love of the country home, for the defense of which he is preparing himself. I do not forget, in saying this, that some States, notably Pennsylvania and Ohio, have already some exceptionally fine cavalry organizations. Others may be expected to have the like as soon as the general government shall offer to assist them. As an incidental result, it may be hoped that a time will come when the saddle horse and equitation will revive, and remain a characteristic of American life.

Every military organization intended for actual service, or having the prospect of being called into action, must have some artillery. The national guard of the United States, to be efficiently organized for the possible task of resisting foreign invasion, must have under constant instruction in peace a battery for each 2,000 infantry men, as its minimum force. To secure this important arm of the military service for the national guard organization, a battery of light artillery, fully equipped and horsed, and with shelter for horses and guns, should be provided by the general government and placed under the immediate control of each State adjutant-general. The government should moreover be authorized by law to muster into the United States service one captain, one lieutenant, two sergeants, four corporals, and sixteen privates (as drivers) for each of these light artillery batteries, to be responsible therefor, and for that constant instruction of drivers and care and drill of horses upon which the efficiency of light artillery depends. Light artillery cannot be improvised for any purpose, not even for the purpose of firing a salute. It is a creation of slow growth, and is of incalculable value as a moral as well as a physical factor whenever and wherever it appears upon the scene.

It is important, not only to organize these batteries under the conditions suggested, but to have them under constant instruction and occasionally at the firing range. The teams must be exercised daily. On Saturday afternoons, without regard to weather, during the seven mildest months of the year, the batteries should be manned at drill; during the other months, as often as the weather permits. Once a month there should be a firing drill, and once a year all the officers, non-commissioned officers, cannoneers, and enlisted men with exceptional pay, should be

mustered into the United States service for two weeks, and supplied amply with ammunition for target practice. Upon these annual occasions concerted action between the authorities of different States may well be adopted to bring together their respective batteries for brigade artillery drill.

The infantry, the most important organization of the national guard for State purposes, has been prevented from coming up to the full needs of the general government in case of war only by the slowness of Congress in appreciating its advantages for national purposes, and in adopting the well-considered and practical recommendations of the National Guard Association of 1881. Nearly all the States have organized the forces their laws authorize. Some have assembled their troops in camps of instruction regimentally; but most of them, wisely, in brigade encampments. United States inspectors have attended many of these encampments. On the whole, the organization of the guard in the several States, and the efforts for making it a more efficient instrument for defense, have awakened a good deal of interest.

This year the War Department has, for the first time, yielded to the request made by some of the States to permit United States troops to join their State encampments, in order to exemplify the advanced results of their military training and discipline, and that the national guard might learn what is meant by the customs of service" (which constitute the unwritten law of the army), and how the regulations of field service are carried out.

But one more step is necessary in order to place the national guard in the way of becoming thoroughly practical soldiers, namely, that it be annually mustered into the United States service in small battalions selected from all the regiments of each State, for forty days, to participate with the regular army in all the duties of field service and maneuvers on the great plains of the West during the annual encampments; the enlisted men receiving such exceptional pay as will render their absence from their professions and vocations not too great a strain upon their resources. In this wise will the national guard and the regular army be brought into accord; possibly to the great advantage of both, certainly to the very great advantage of the government.

By the participation of the general government in the support

of the national guard as suggested, the nation will soon secure a large efficient national force of all arms of the service, suitable for every emergency, and at a cost to the government of only $2,000,000 annually, including $800,000 for ordnance—a cost so small in comparison to the dignity it will give the nation in peace, or to the strength it will afford in war, that all the people will rejoice when such support is given. Let us hope that an appeal of the people to Congress for the protection of the capital, as well as for the safety of the great commercial cities, will be answered by an annual appropriation of $2,000,000 for the national guard.

J. C. KELTON.

art.

THE DOMAIN OF ROMANCE.

THAT criticism goes astray during long periods of time, is one of the most prominent facts in the history of literature and For five hundred years Dictys was set above Homer. The tradition of Malherbe's alleged exaltation of literary art is scarcely extinct in France even now. Neither Shakespeare nor Molière found immediate and adequate critical recognition. To judge from the current expressions of popular opinion, Raphael and Michael Angelo and all the rest of the great masters were as nothing compared with Millet, or, for that matter, with Whistler. Vogues engendered by accident, and kept in motion by fashion or by the whim of an influential clique, often appear to be rooted in a mood of civilization, although history and the very nature of man make the thing impossible. Art is the flower of human life, and, as in plant life the flower is but a fine modification of the leaf, the art bloom is but the highest manifestation of man's development. No true art is ever a graft or a parasite, nor ever a forced growth taking color and quality under the touch of self-conscious manipulators, who model by alien standards of ethical and aesthetical limitation. The blood is the life, and imagination is the blood of art. In the expression, "creative art," the adjective is a redundancy, for art is creation; the artist is nots, a maker, an inventor. Shift formulas as we may, originality of invention is the distinguishing mark of all that is best in the works of genius. From Eschylus and Homer down to Scott and Hugo, the criterion has been imaginative lift, without which no product of art effort has resisted the persistent acid of time. Looking down the perspective of past ages, what monuments of realism do we see standing by the way-side, solid, uncorroded, and still appealing successfully to the human soul? Not one. To the genuine artist nature is but a symbol. The infancy of graphic art was realism in its form, that is, it was the crude, outright delineation of natural

objects; but the drawings were, in the hands of untutored genius, an expression of romance. Behind the stiff, stolid, sharpjointed sketches stalked the spirits of heroes and demigods. The romance of religion, the awful secrets of life and death, the possible attainments of the human being, and the meaning of the universe were more than hinted in the atmosphere of the very earliest art. This has been used in the arguments of the realists to liscredit modern romance, and to show that idealism is but a play thing of the world's childhood; but it must be admitted that children like Homer and Dante and Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, Dickens, and Hugo have played with the bauble to some purpose, and still have a moderate following, notwithstanding that the recent "analytical school" of realists has ordered them to cease their noise, and go play in the back yard while the world is studying "Daisy Miller" or admiring the dreary self-seduction of "Anna Karénina."

What is romance, viewed in the light of the almost full orb of the nineteenth century? Is it mere fairy lore, or mere Jackthe-Giant-Killer nonsense for the amusement of babes? Scott's great work, "Ivanhoe," is a romance; so is Hugo's “Les Misérables"; so is George Eliot's "Romola "; and the list may be lengthened indefinitely with such books as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "David Copperfield," "A Tale of Two Cities," Dumas's stories, and, the realist critics to the contrary notwithstanding, Balzac's wonderful crazy-quilt, the "Comédie Humaine.” Poe's fictions are all romance; so are Hawthorne's; and, barring certain stereotyped peculiarly French features, the best of Daudet's stories are romance of a very poetical sort. This is saying nothing about Goethe and Cervantes and all the older masters of romance; nor are Charlotte Brontë and George Sand mentioned. The realists, in defining their own area, concede to romance the domain it rightfully occupies. Photography is realism; everything else is romance. The delineation of fact is realism; all else is romance. What I have seen, or touched, or heard, or smelt, or tasted, that I may depict; that is realism, anything beyond is romance. The realist can indulge in no theories, no inferences; he is an agnostic; some one must pose for him when he wishes to delineate a character in fiction;