And all that I have longed to be, the brave
High dreams of youth that languished nigh forgot
Seem half accomplished. Easy now to slave
At tasks colossal, so my friend fail not.
And I am filled with gentle wonderment
That life can be so good and breath so sweet:
While all my world grows suddenly complete
That I must love it with a new content.
So speech grows overfull, and we are fain
To drink of silence like a golden cup
With wine of sweet companionship filled up
That has no end, nor any thirst can drain.
And so at last no wish is left to me
Save thus to dream into eternity.

This is my first white love.

The second flame

Burns red and fierce as noon-time on the earth,
A wild, full-blooded love that sprang to birth
Naked and unafraid, yet scorning shame

And clean as winds that sweep the desert's breast.
My flame of passion this, born of the sun

And warm red earth, so æon-long ago,

In languid, throbbing noons, when dust was pressed
To amorous dust, and longing made it one.
This is a good love too, and must be so,

Though bloodless fathers crushed it and denied,
And on a cross of virtue crucified

This firm sweet flesh that colors with our soul.
Aye! it is good, and beautiful, and clean,
To feel within my veins the surge and flow
Of young desire waking, that the whole
Warm universe has felt: to call, and preen,
And dance before my mate that he may know
An answering surge, and leap, and make me his
And glad with every fecund thing that is.
God! It is good to feel the primal cry,
The deep, mad longing for another life,-

My life and his, that shall be born of me,-
A little child of flame, that when we die
We may cheat time, nor perish in the strife:
But in this hour of vital ecstasy

When life is molten, we may stamp thereon
Our own glad image, and conceive, and live.
And sweet it is, and languid, when the tide.
Has ebbed, for lack of more than I can give,
To take his hand who breathes so close beside
And lay it on my breast, and humble me

To say:
"Thou art my lord. Thy will my own."
So at the last this wish is mine, to be
Struck at the high-tide into nothingness,
To die, ere he can learn to love me less.

So these my loves are perfect, each alone
Sufficient in itself and all complete,
Yet one of two, like rival beacons shown,
That call and call me, but that never meet.
For yet they have not met, nor ever burned
The white flame in the red, the red in white
Till both were wed together there, and turned
To some half-dreamed intensity of light.

For I have dreamed,-yes, in my priestess soul
The longing grows for one great altar fire
That shall leap up to heaven, a winged desire,
Not two but one, a perfect, living whole.
Is this a dream? Are all great lovers dreams?
Can red and white be fused, or two be one?
Yseult and Eloise, are they but themes
Whereon men hang the yearnings they have spun?
And must I cherish so till the end's end

My sweet loves sundered, lover here, or friend?
Nay, I know not! I guard by day and night
My leaping flames, the red one and the white.

W

BREAD AND BUTTER AND ART

FREDERICK JAMES GREGG

E are getting on in spite of the cries of those who are being pushed to the wall. There was a time when if you got half a dozen men around a marble-topped café table they would quarrel about politics, eugenics, socialism, or what not. Now you will find them arguing about the new sculpture and the new painting. The arts have, in fact, been losing their museum quality, have been brought into the places where people live, enjoy themselves and take their ease. Even those who refuse to be convinced are forced to admit that for them too the light has passed out of many an admired canvas and the charm out of many an adored bronze or marble. A period of disillusion this is, surely, even if it should prove in the long run to be the birth time of a new illusion.

It had come to be taken for granted, in some quarters, that art was not so much even as a subject of general inquiry. This usually took the form of an assertion, by certain artists, that they only were the proper judges of painting and sculpture. This claim might be shown to be fantastic by citing the plain fact that the bitterest foes of men of genius have been those of their own craft, and that, in the majority of cases, a proper appreciation of what was strange and unusual had been arrived at and expressed by those whose minds were not warped by the prejudices induced by professional self-interest. The painter who has struggled to recognition and success against the opposition of the older men of his own day and generation becomes set in his ideas in the long run. From a young" rebel" he grows into an elderly conservative, and fails to notice that his latter case corresponds exactly with that of his former foes.

Then there is the natural weakness of the human mind for finality. Even such a genius as Swift thought that the English language might be fixed once for all. Many want everything settled and done with, for why should not what is good enough for to-day be good enough for to-morrow? But the imagination does not move along painfully from precedent to

precedent. It delights in breaking the rules and mocks at the canons. The difference between a genius and a man of talent is that the genius stands for the greatest freedom of the imagination, while in the talented man the imagination is made to conform to limitations suggested by prudence, or respectability, or both.

The academic attitude is almost pathetically familiar. There is no mystery about it. It involves arraying the institution against the outside individual. But new blood, it will be said, is injected into the organization frequently. True enough. Yet it will be found that care is taken not to make the process dangerous in any sense. So, as they say that the most stubborn defender of class privilege is always a former radical, your most sturdy academician is always a sometime rebel. That his work has been consecrated by orthodox approval makes him forgive what disgusted him before in his new associates. He may delude himself into the belief that they have changed. What he doesn't see is that the change is in himself. The last thing that he is likely to understand is that his capture may be used as an argument to prove for the benefit of the careless that the enemies of what is new are ever on the lookout for what is different from the old.

Of the same family with the academician is the art teacher. Of course he may be one and the same person, but in this second special capacity he is more injurious than in the other. He begins by having pupils and ends by having disciples. His favorites are those who succeed in imitating his method and manner. Having surrounded himself with a band of followers, he attaches them to his fortunes by using his official influence on their behalf. The lucky ones start with prizes, proceed to medals, advance to the dignity of associate academicians and then discover that honors in perpetuity, like wall-space in the Metropolitan Museum, are not beyond their reach. If the master is attacked, or if anybody has the temerity to try to help the "cause of art" without his consent, the hangers-on are up in arms at once. The great man usually has a very foreign name, the more so the better. But he is very patriotic. He is all for national art, and looks on art from abroad with frowning,

or at least mild condescension. When he is cornered, or has no other argument available, he hauls forth from his coat-tail pocket the flag of his adopted country and waves it with all the assurance of a vulgar singing-actor appealing to the top gallery. One might fancy with justice indeed that it was not the mummer, but the artist, who had first commercialized the most sacred symbol of the nation.

The more one considers the attitude of the academic, of the teachers and of the run of established artists, the plainer it becomes that prejudice is the result of stout loyalty to bread and butter, bed and board. The "arrived " producers of works of art are as much concerned as the over-stocked middleman, the dealer, at the very thought of any disturbance in public taste. The more sedate of the magazines are now full of protests against the lawlessness of the age, and those who fought valiantly the good fight for the Impressionists are leaders in defending us from what they are pleased to describe as the vicious and corrupting influence of the Post-Impressionists.

Few have the sense of the correspondent of a provincial newspaper, described by W. B. Yeats, who was ordered by his chief to send him an article on the first London Post-Impressionist exhibition. The following reply went down to Manchester: "I have seen the pictures and think that they are rotten. But I won't say so in print, for I don't want to look like a damned. fool twenty years from now."

American Modernists! A year ago that would have been a contradiction in terms, except in the case of a few very young men who had brought home from Paris a taste for the new styles in painting and sculpture; young men who apparently showed little discrimination, except in so far as they were determined to be in the fashion.

Mr. Roosevelt, after his visit to the Armoury International Exhibition, said, "It is a good thing to shake them up." Once more the shrewd intuition of the layman has been justified. For those who shook up others have been shaken up themselves. At that time it was possible to count on the fingers of one hand the American painters and sculptors who showed in their work any sign of a progressive spirit. Exhibitions held in New York