anything and be blamed for it upsets her completely. She had made one or two pies with mediocre results, and we found her most unwilling to try again. For a time we sadly set this down to the fact that she must be acquiring the sophisticated belief that the mistress of the house should make all the desserts. Then one day Ellen made a pie and it was excellent. We said so, and Ellen's face became radiant. "I'll make you a pie every day if you'll only like them," she promised. Whereupon squash pie followed apple, and mince, squash, and cranberry, mince, until even the son of the family, who happily hails pie as a "male dessert," in contradistinction to "custards and such little messes," was forced to cry "hold, enough!" On another occasion, when we were putting up preserves on a day which unexpectedly turned out to be the hottest of the summer ("I don't see how you dared ask her to do it," my neighbor had said; "I know mine would have left on the spot"), Ellen suddenly burst out: "Aren't we having a good time!" Ellen has the spirit of Erin in her in many and diverse ways—in her patience with little children, in her love of animals, in her dimples and ready blushes, in her sweet (though sometimes quick) temper, in her whimsical sayings, and most of all in her soft, pretty accent. Much of the time she talks with very little brogue, but now and again she forgets herself to a rich, delicious breadth of speech. The first rainy morning of her stay she met me with the greeting: ""Tis a fine day for yoong doocks." Of course, the spelling is ridiculously inadequate to convey her pronunciation. The combination of the quaint saying and the quainter brogue was as poignantly, exquisitely Irish as the wail of an Irish folk-song. One of Ellen's childlike weaknesses came to light when we had as guest a young girl who wore glasses. I noticed that Ellen seemed greatly interested in her, and the next day she confided in me that she thought her very pretty. "And how fine them glasses do look on her!" "She hates them," I explained. "It's a great trial to her that she has to wear them." Ellen's big blue eyes grew bigger and bluer. "Oh, Miss Ruth," she said, "I'd just love to wear glasses. I think they're beautiful. I'm always hoping I'll have to wear them." My mother often complains sadly that Ellen is not so thorough about many things as she could wish. There is one thing, however, which Ellen does more thoroughly than any one I have ever seen-I refer to her blushing. A single teasing reference to the grocer boy, or the gas-man, or the laundryman, or any of the several functionaries who seem to spend more time in our kitchen than they did before the advent of Ellen, will bring the color surging up into her face. Redder and redder it gets until the bright blue eyes look two shades deeper blue in the midst of all that suffusion and her throat and neck, and finally her small, pretty ears, are touched with scarlet. The son of the house avers that if you pointed a finger at her and said "blush" she would do it, and is with difficulty dissuaded from trying the experiment. Ellen, of course, is very much ashamed of her blushes and most indignant at her inability to control them. In vain we tell her that it is pleasant to see any one who still possesses that old-fashioned faculty. "Tis not the truth you do be telling me," she bursts out with unwonted lack of deference. ""Tis a terrible thing to bloosh, and I do be always doing it when I have no wish to, and a great trial it's always been to me. Why, Miss Ruth, when two of us had been in some mischief in school they'd bring us face to face, and whichever one blooshed they'd punish, and I'd always bloosh, whether or not." Ellen is not a chatterbox. She is too well-bred a servant for that, and the background of her reticences sets off her occasional flashes of confidential speech. I often wish she would chatter a little more, so piquant are the glimpses she gives me into the little Irish schoolhouse or into that alert, childlike mind that is forever silently reacting on this new world of ours. Unless we should be as fortunate as her aunt's much-mourned family, I know that Ellen is destined to become only a memory within a few years, and I should like to have more of these flashes to remember her by. But, in any event, I shall always have stored away among the impressions that sum up my past life that pleasant consciousness of her sweet, simple, Irish personality, that I call, for lack of better phrasing, the flavor of Ellen. L LITHOGRAPHY FOR THE ARTIST affinity between grease and water. The crayon or ink used in drawing on the stone is of a greasy composition, as is also the ink used for printing. To print, water is first applied to the stone, which accepts it only at the places not drawn upon. On the other hand, when ink is applied to the stone it adheres only to the portions actually covered by the design. The result, in printing, is a faithful facsimile, on paper, of the drawing on stone. To obviate the necessity of handling the heavy stone, the artist may draw upon "transfer paper," from which the design is then transferred to the stone. [ITHOGRAPHY, invented about one hundred and twenty years ago, has acquired such importance through extensive application to business needs that a taint of "commercialism" seems to hang about it in the minds of many people. And yet, not many years after its discovery by Senefelder, a number of artists showed active appreciation of the rich possibilities which it offered them. Here was a supple medium, not calling for a great amount of technical preparation, flexible to the artist's touch, which it reproduced with absolute fidelity-an "autographic art," directly expressing individual style and temperament without intervention of any engraver-translator; a process with a wide variety of possible effects such as no other one reproductive art offers. Crayon, pen, ink, brush, and scraper can be used on the stone, producing chalk drawings which may strike the octave from the lightest, most delicate gray to the deepest black, of a rich, velvety texture; tones rubbed in with a sauce of powdered crayon; washes done with pen and ink; lights brought out by scraping. And all of this to be printed in black and white or in color, as preferred. The whole process is based on the lack of crayon-and-scraper effects of A. de Lemud; Of course, despite this wide range of possibilities, lithography has its distinct limits to be respected by the artist-its character and its limitations must be understood by him. The rich means of expression dormant in the stone were utilized in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. It is easy enough to find there strongly contrasted examples. Look at the shimmering, silvery-gray tones of J. B. Isabey and the rich, deep harmonies of his son Eugène; the elegant, suave, and at times subtle crayoning of Achille Devéria; the audacious handling of the medium by Delacroix in his "Lion de l'Atlas" and "Tigre Royal"; the The and the spotty wash-drawing results by A. Hervier. It was a period of brilliant achievement. The painter Géricault's revolt against a cold classicism found its echo in the "brilliancy and warmth" which, as Bouchot said, he brought into lithography. Decamps. carried his qualities as a colorist into the gamut of tones bounded by the white paper and the darkest black that the crayon yields. "Napoleonic legend" was carried on, with patriotic fervor, with military spirit, but also with humor, particularly by Raffet and Charlet. The soldiers of the "Little Corporal" move through an imposing array of lithographic albums and separate prints. Pictorial satire also found in lithography a ready and facile means of expression. From the mass of caricaturistsDoré, Philipon, Traviès, Jacque, Beaumont, Cham, Grandville, Vernier-there stand out two, Daumier and Gavarni, by sheer force the medium, thus farther emphasizing the range of the latter. A forceful pictorial satirist, an artist of compelling power, Daumier worked with a big stroke, with elemental force. Gavarni's touch, on the other hand, had the verve of elegance and brilliancy and expressed a trenchant wit. Among the publications illustrated with lithographic plates was the famous series "Voyages pittoresques en France," edited by Nodier and Baron Taylor. In that appeared two of the finest plates of the Englishman R. P. Bonington: "Rue du Gros Horloge, Rouen," and "Tour du Gros Horloge." They are of a noteworthy delicacy, the architecture bathed in an atmosphere that permits decorative detail to be surmised through suggestion, though no clean-cut definition of detail is disclosed. Bonington's clever countryman, J. D. Harding, was remarkably facile and dexterous, both in lithotint (wash effect) and crayon, The Bear Pit. By Menzel. with which he at times combined so vigorous a scraping of whites that the latter have an embossed effect in printing, the paper having been pressed into the deeply cut spaces. He has a certain kinship with Calame, the Swiss, from whom one may pass to Germany, where the work of Menzel is prominently noteworthy. In the six plates. of his "Attempts on Stone with Brush and Scraper" (1851) he employed an ink wash, from which he scraped his lights. I recall no one who has employed this mezzotint process on stone in just the same way and with such virtuosity. The wide-spread practice of this fascinat ing art ceased over a generation ago. Still, drawings-suggestive, like his etchings, the process has never quite missed its appeal born of the line and insisting on it, tremu as a means of original expression, a "painter art." The last quarter of the nineteenth century particularly beheld artist-lithographers sufficiently large. in number and varied in outlook and style to prove again both the many resources of lithography and its adaptability to changing views in art. Fantin Latour, the "melomaniac" artist, enveloped his emotional interpretation of Wagner and other composers in a vaporous grain absolutely peculiar to his style. With his harmonies, sonorous yet delicate, you may, if you will, compare the fantastic symbolism of the mystic Redon or, running to opposites altogether, the High Bridge. One of a series of New York views by C. F. W. Mielatz. Reproduced by the courtesy of the Society of Iconophiles. lously expressive of his nervously temperamental response to artistic mood. His light, joyous touch is different alike from the pale-gray crayonage of the earliest men and from the rich resonance, the throbbing color feeling in later work, such as that by Eugene Isabey or Huet. His tendency toward tenderness rather than richness, toward gray rather than black, is found, with different personal note, in Shannon and others of his day and ours. With Whistler we have come near home. What have we to show here? In the early days Rembrandt Peale did (in the twenties) a highly creditable head irresponsible, gay frivolity of Willette. of Washington. Thirty to forty years later Continuing in the antithetical vein, there there were issued, partly through the efforts are the Oriental dreams of Bauer and the incisive precision of Veth in Holland; the firm, tight modelling of Greiner and the light touch of Slevogt in Germany; the broad vigor of Brangwyn and the silver-point delicacy of Legros in England. And if color work delight there are the resounding blast in the "Absinthe Drinker" of Lunois, the flat yet modulated tints employed by Kallmorgen, Volkmann, or Biese, and the almost evanescent color notes flecked upon some of Whistler's lithographic drawings. Whist ler did some lithotints, evening or night scenes, with completeness of tonal effect, but most of his lithographs were crayon Tigre Royal. By Delacroix. of the late Louis Prang, some interesting drawings showing the quiet charm of J. Foxcroft Cole, the picturesque swing of medium, and H. W. Ranger, who offered a remarkable rendition of a rainy day on a Paris quay. A little later Robert J. Wickenden did twoscore subjects (note "La Mère Panneçaye"), Mary Cassatt tried the medium just once, J. S. Sargent contributed one or two drawings of models of an unctuous, suggestive draftsmanship similar to that which we know in his aquarelles. And there is, too, that series of New York views (the "High Bridge" one of the most striking) done for the Society of Iconophiles by C. F. W. Mielatz. Mielatz has kept more strictly to etching, while Pennell has continued to intersperse lithographs, some with the crisp, gray, pencillike strokes of his Holland scenes, others with the deep tones of his "Rouen Cathedral." It is characteristic of Pennell and of our time that he has told of the "Wonder of Work" (in New York, Wilkes-Barre, Niagara, and Charleroi, Belgium) and of acteristic work by George Bellows. I can recall only three of our artists who have continued to woo the process with some sort of fidelity, even intermittent; Albert Sterner has, from the days of his portraits with a Munich influence to such late productions as the "Pierrot Mourning His Dead Love," touched with Gallic grace. Arthur B. Davies paid court for a while, almost in secret; his dozen or so experiments are delightful examples of the sensitive adaptation of lithography to his poetic fancies. And then there's John Sloan, whom the process served well in a series of subjects similar to those illustrated in his etchings. Would that we might see more! Just now it is all etching. Meanwhile, one can nurse the hope that some day more artists will awaken to the advantages of a process that is as light in its technical demands on their skill as it is rich in the resources it offers. F. WEITENKAMPF. |