imagination which is the chief attribute of genius, the imagination which lies at the root of all true poetry, all great painting, and without which dramatic art, however technically perfect, is but a soulless and empty imitation.

Underneath the external form and style of Mansfield's art there is the soul, the temperament of the actor. Into each impersonation he throws so much Promethean fire that it is vital with human sympathy and emotion.

Mansfield's imagination is also shown by his skill in suggestion. He sets other imaginations to working; you feel that there is more in his characters than he cares to reveal. He imparts an air of mystery to his characters. His work is not done on a hard surface. It has atmosphere. It opens out limitless visions.

John Corbin says that "the touchstone of histrionic genius is in the power of giving vibrant force and varied color to

the verbal utterance of emotion." Doubtless he has in mind Mansfield's own words in a speech he once delivered to the students of the Empire School of Acting. "When you are acting a part," said Mansfield, "think of your voice as a color, and, as you paint your picture, (the character you are painting, the scene you are portraying,) mix your colors. You have on your palate (pallet) a white voice, la voix blanche; a heavenly ethereal, or blue voice, the voice of prayer; a disagreeable, jealous, or yellow voice; a steel gray voice, for quiet sarcasm; a brown voice of hopelessness; a lurid, red voice of hot rage; a deep, thunderous voice of black; a cheery voice, the color of the green sea, that a brisk breeze is crisping, and then there's a pretty little pink voice and shades of violet-but the subject is endless."

66

"Some excellent voices," says Corbin, 'suggest silver. They do very well for

the minor movements of the heart, the palely reflected moonlight of the spirit. Mansfield's voice is pure gold. Even in its most delicate and colloquial shadings it has the fresh color, the unmistakable authenticity of sunlight. Its anger is torrid, its rage scarlet; and when the shadow of defeat, despair, and even death, passes over and into it it glows with the crimson and the purple of sunset. In that nobly restrained scene of the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius the austere carriage and the luminous eye of the actor will linger long in memory; but what swelled the veins and lifted the heart into the throat was the smouldering pathos of the voice.

"O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs

No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead.""

In the scene before Agincourt King Henry's prayer swelled like an organ with majestic spiritual fervor.

"O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;

Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O
Lord,

O not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!""

None of us will ever forget the thrill we felt when Alceste, in fiery abandon and passionate fervor thundered out:

"I love my love, I love my love so well

In a magazine article it is impossible to attempt an adequate criticism of Richard Mansfield's work. But a slight tribute to the worth and value of that work is one which every lover of the best art is glad to pay. Now that Henry Irving is gone there is no one to dispute Richard Mansfield's leadership. KENYON WEST.

New York City.

THE FIVE SYBILS OF RAPHAEL-IN SANTA MARIA DELLA PACE, ROME.

I

HAVE taken the Art of the East and West at the present time. I do not include in my remarks on Western Art any of our inheritance of the past, but only the contemporary phases that we are producing at the present. I am not comparing the ethical standards of Japan, but their standards of Art with those of Western countries.

Art is simply the harmonious expression of human emotions and thoughtthe power to perceive the beautiful and express it in artistic forms.

Art is always interpretative. It interprets the life and feelings of the people of the period. We all recognize that "the coin outlives the empire, the bust survives the state."

Art is of two great classes, Creative and Decorative.

Creative Art follows no canons. It is purely and simply inspirational, but creating always new forms of expressing itself. Where Art expresses high ideals, impersonating great qualities, as Justice, Mercy, Truth, Heroic Action,-it becomes creative.

Creative Art elevates the intellectual and spiritual side of man's nature, teaching unconsciously a lesson, appealing to our highest faculties with subtile power, developing the poetic instinct.

Decorative Art, on the other hand, is only a part and is subordinate and does not necessarily appeal to the highest faculties.

One proof of the greatness of Creative Art, is that it requires a certain measure of mental development on the part of the beholder to appreciate it, while Decorative Art requires little effort of mind to understand.

Decorative Art may express these high sentiments but they are always subordinated to the ornamental embellishment, for which it stands.

It is a rule in all composition that the principal idea, the predominant creative feeling, should never be confounded with the accompanying decorations, or ornamental development, although it should be expressed by it. Therefore the separation of Art into the two classes.

Decorative Art follows always some set canons, and has for its aim pleasing qualities, without thought and desire for the creative quality.

Decorative Art is the adaptation of the beautiful to living. It is interpretative as far as it gives one a graphic conception of an intellectual idea.

Ruskin says in Stones of Venice that at times the decorative becomes so great that it develops into the creative, and the building is simply a support or easel. He cites this as a decadence of art. But take, for example, Raphael's "Sibyls" in the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. The decoration so far outvalues the creative structure of the church that the whole architecture is but a casket containing this precious jewel.

Does the West truly understand what Decorative Art is? Are they not unconsciously copyists of greater masters, and have they the originality for fine decorative results?

The Japanese seem to have the spirit of true Decorative Art, in which the West was lacking until recent years. With the advent of the mural decorations of Puvis de Chavannes in Paris, some thirty years ago, Decorative Art took a great step on to a higher plane. The simple principles that Puvis de Chavannes in

stituted were that true Decorative Art must be of such a character that the attention should never be concentrated on any part at the expense of the whole constructive work.

Louis Gonse, Director of Gazette de Beaux Arts, in his introduction to his book L'Art Japonais says: "This idea ought to be clearly expressed. The Japanese are the first decorators of the world. All explanation of their esthetic work ought to be searched with a supreme instinct of harmonies, in a constant, logical, inflexible subordination of art to the needs of life, to a recreation of the eye. One risks misunderstanding the rarest and most delicate of artistic industries of Japan if one does not place himself at this point of definite view. We have insensibly lost the feeling of decoration and the sense of color while the Japanese just to this latest moment have kept theirs intact."

A recent Japanese artist, who stands for the old Art of Japan writes: "Our difficulty lies in the fact that Japanese Art stands alone in the world, without immediate possibility of any accession or reinforcement from kindred ideals or technique. The unfortunately contemptuous attitude which the average Westerner assumes towards everything connected with Oriental civilization tends to destroy our self-confidence in regard to our canons of Art. Those Europeans who appreciate our efforts may not realize that the West as a whole is constantly preaching the superiority of its own culture and its Art to those of the East. Japan stands alone against all the world. Its Art has done wonders in remaining true to itself in spite of the odds it has had to face."

A Japanese critic, writing of the process of absorbing new ideas which has mainly occupied the Japanese nation for the past thirty years said: "Thus, theoretically, as well as practically, it will be best for Japan to hold fast to her own ideals of Asiatic tradition. It is a service she owes to humanity. She is the last

custodian of ancient Oriental culture. She, alone, has the advantage of seeing through the materialistic shams with which Western civilization delude themselves, and of appropriating only such material as may help to rekindle her native flame. The fusion of Western and Eastern ideals, which was accomplished two thousand years ago by Alexander the Great, who carried the borders of Greece to India, would become for the second time possible, and create in both hemispheres a far more rounded civilization than either has ever known. Through her temperament, her individuality, her deeper insight into the secrets of the East, her ready appropriation of the powers of the West, and, more than all, through the fact that she enjoys the privilege of being a pioneer, it may have been decreed in the secret council-chambers of Destiny that on her shores shall be first created the new Art which shall prevail throughout the world, for the next thousand years."

The essential difference between the decorative qualities of Japanese Art and that of other countries of modern Western civilization, especially the Anglo-Saxon, might be summed up in the bare fact that our ponderous seriousness precludes any possible near approach to Nature, or to that which is intrinsically graceful or decorative in Nature.

We have an inherent dislike to express our feelings in our Art, while the Japanese are delighted to discover this most subtile of human qualities.

We have missed the essence of simplicity and are inclined to look upon honest expressions of feeling as the birthright of the weak alone, while the Japanese live along the line of least resistance in their atmosphere of Art. Here, therefore, is the immense difference in the attitude of the Japanese toward decorative feeling to that engendered by commercialism such as ours.

One might say at the very start, that it is almost impossible to make comparisons between our decorative Art and that

of Japan because much that we seem to have is imitation, while all the Japanese have is really their own.

We are too busy to sit in silence, in admiration, or in contemplation of a sprig of apple-blossom, or to gaze in a pool and dream of the wonderful beauty of a waterlily, and see in this flower great cause for feeling joy and reverence.

We have little reverence.

How can the inner feeling for the beautifully decorative that keeps alive the sublime love of Art ever have a chance to grow when there is apparently so little reverence for human life, and almost none for the life of Nature?

The Western mind has made its Art hard, while the more simple mind of the Japanese has made it possible for that nation to make its Art creative as well as decorative, and appreciative of the beauty in Nature. We must reach deep, if we would know the causes of our failure to appreciate the beautiful in Nature. We must find out why we fail even to appreciate beauty in humanity. Why we, supposedly the most gifted of the races of the earth, have lost our finer feelings, and are almost devoid of reverence for beauty itself,—and why we are apt to drag in every outside influence at the wrong time. Money is worshiped in place of the beautiful, while the rush and struggle of modern existence gives no opportunity for the leisure required for the crystallization of ideals. It is this commercial spirit that tends to debase our ideals, to harden our natures, and to blind us to the reality of beauty. Even in his ideal of his God, the Anglo-Saxon has stripped him of most of those lovable attributes that are human, one may say, truly divine,—and have left in his hand only the "mighty sword of Death."

In Letters of a Chinese Official he says: “In your civilization a man to be a man must venture, struggle, compete and win. To this characteristic of your society is to be attributed, no doubt, its immense activity and its success in material arts. But to this is due the feature that most

strikes a Chinese. Its unrest, its confusion. Among you no one is content; no one has leisure to live. To us of the East, all this is a mark of a barbarous society. We measure the degree of civilization, not by accumulation of the means of living, but by the character and nature of the life lived."

The West takes pride in its emancipation from medieval superstition, but what of that idolatrous worship of wealth that has taken its place? What sufferings and discontent lie hidden behind the gorgeous mask of the present! The voice of socialism is a wail over the agonies of Western economics-the tragedy of capital and labor.

The Japanese do not live always in the winter side of their natures. We, apparently, live constantly in the frozen zone of sordid desires; we rarely see the re-birth of the world in the springtime. We live in winter as far as our mental life is concerned, all the year round. We only exist in this mad rush, this feverish haste to be above and beyond our brothers, to live outside human feelings.

The Japanese, like the ancient Greeks, were more fond of the portrayal of great deeds, of the beauty and relation of Nature to man, of the nobler side of humanity, than are we to-day.

Go to the Paris Salon, and see there depicted on huge canvases, the terrible slaughter of the early Christians, and the paintings representing killing and death. In Japanese Art there is never pictured actual killing; there are great warriors brandishing swords, but never the actual gore. It is like the highest period of Greek Art which always dealt with the great creative element in the human soul, and not with the details of the destructive element in the human mind.

Is it to be wondered at that the Japanese painter looks in wonder at our Art and sees in it little else except a reflection of the wolfish nature that predominates in our Western civilization. We talk of "A Life of Love"; we preach it; the Japanese live it. They see God in every