allowed to enter Turkey. They would render letter-writing unidentifiable, the Sultan's spies assert. Of Europe's family of nations Germany has the most telephones, France comes second, and England third. But the ratio of telephone calls to the population is highest in Sweden. The United States, however, is pre-eminently the land of the "phone." In Berlin there is one telephone to every seventeen families; in Paris, one to every twenty-two families; in London, one to every fiftyeight families. American figures show a much higher ratio of intelligence and business enterprise. New York has one telephone to every twelve families; Boston, one to every six families; San Francisco had, on January 1, 1906, one telephone to every four families. Since 1880 the Bell Companies alone have increased their mileage of wire about five hundred per cent. Yet the population of the country has, during the same time, increased at only one-tenth of that rate. The rural districts should not be left unnoticed. They had 260,000 miles of single wire and 267,000 telephones in use during 1905. All Europe had last year only 2,044,200 miles of wire. Yet that grand division contains about five times as many inhabitants as the United States. But Europe is unprogressive compared with us. Outside its cities, the telephone is little used. Here its imperious call is heard everywhere-in the huge department store, thronged with city crowds; in lonely lumber camps, buried in the depths of primeval forests; in the rice swamps of our Gulf States; on the vast wheat ranches of the West; in the mines of Pennsylvania or Colorado-in short, wherever American energy is turning raw material into wealth. The most urgent need of trade or commerce -of wealth production or wealth distribution-is quick communication. Hence it is a truism nowadays that expansion of business means increased telephonage. But, if business aids the telephone, it is also true that the telephone aids business-creates it, indeed, under certain circumstances. Spread a network of telephone wires over a backward rural community and note the surprising improvement visible in a few years. The people have been awakened, stirred into activity, educated up to higher standards. If public demand has made the Bell Companies supreme in the field of telephony, be it remembered that the telephone has made itself indispensable in business. This benefit is a direct benefit. Incidentally the companies, by employing labor and paying good wages, help every city wherein they maintain an exchange. Telephony is a new art and has opened new avenues of employment, especially to women. The manager of the New York exchange, in 1878, found himself hurriedly compelled to augment his force of employees, owing to rapid increase in the use of the telephone. It was impossible to obtain competent men enough. By accident he learned that a young woman had charge of the switchboard in the exchange in Bridgeport, Conn. Her success gave him a hint; and in a few days young women were installed in all his switchboard operator chairs. The Bridgeport young lady was the first telephone operator of her sex in the United States. To-day the Companies have more than twenty thousand women operators in their employ. Telephony enables them all to earn larger wages than they would receive in any other occupation. Thirty years ago every noted physicist in the world would have scoffed and scorned a proposition to convey speech by wire. Bell says of himself, "Had I known more about electricity and less about sound, I should never have invented the telephone." So simple was its mechanism that the first telephone was characterized as the very hardihood of invention. It bears no resemblance to the complicated apparatus to be seen in any central exchange in this year of grace, 1906. Marvellous, indeed, is the progress which has been made since the war-stirring patent of 1876 was issued. Hundreds of keen minds have co-operated to produce the perfected telephone of to-day. Nevertheless, in science, as in reform, it is the first step that costs. The world cannot forget its obligation to the inventor of the original telephone. Two countries have the right to be especially proud of him--Scotland, the land of his birth, and the United States, the land of his adoption. Each country has a splendid bead-roll of names illustrious in applied science. Yet it is safe to say that posterity will honor none of them more highly than the name of Alexander Graham Bell. A NOON SONG By Henry van Dyke THERE are songs for the morning and songs for the night, Oh, the high noon, and the clear noon, When the sky burns, and the sun turns How swiftly he rose when the dawning was past; Ah, steep was the climbing that led him at last To the height of his throne in the blue summer sky. Oh, the long toil, and the slow toil, The toil that may not rest, Till the sun looks down, from his journey's crown, Then a quietness falls over meadow and hill, And the wings of the wind in the forest are furled; The river flows softly, the bird-songs are still, And the workers are resting all over the world. Oh, the good hour, and the kind hour, The hour that calms the breast! Little inn half-way on the road of the day, There's a plentiful feast in the green tree's shade, Of all the day the best! When the sky burns, and the sun turns, And looks to his home in the west! THE POINT OF VIEW A Ending" WELL-KNOWN publisher's entire advertising space in a recent issue of a London weekly is given to the name and author of a certain novel, with the announcement, in script type and double leads, that it tells an original and pathetic story of deepest human interest, but with a happy ending." The final word is what fixes the attention. Is the taste of the novel-reading public returning to the once popuThe "Happy lar but outgrown view? Is the "happy ending" again to be emphasized in an advertisement in order to promote the success of a given tale as a "seller"? For it is many years, and things have changed, since Mr. James described the point of view of some of the "many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping. . They would say that a novel depends for a 'happy ending' on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks." It would be a matter of small surprise, indeed, of small significance, should there be return of public liking to the story whose "pathos" and "deepest human interest" ended happily, even with conventional accompaniments. It has taken generations for the novel to develop through Mr. Brander Matthews' stages of the novel of the Impossible, of the Improbable and of the Probable, to the novel of the Inevitable-the novel of which we say, in modern phrase, that it is "convincing"; and also, as many add, that it is "unpleasant." For not a few who clearly recognize in a certain story that, given the characters, the circumstances, and the environment, the ending must be what it is, wretched or indifferent, yet protest inwardly at such acknowledgment of the necessity. They feel that the artist ought to have been ingenious, if not truthful; that he should have found a way out by which, without doing too great violence to our knowledge of the actualities, he might dispose in more pleasing fashion of his characters and good possibilities. Persons of this attitude sometimes frankly, sometimes half-consciously and apologetically, seek in fiction what will not serve in lifee-a blinking or an avoidance of the disagreeable side of the inevitable. "The history of literature has taught us," says Mr. Bliss Perry, "that men have always craved what I may call the fiction of compensation, the fiction that yields them what life cannot yield them." If this be true of any of the comparatively few who take their fiction seriously, to what an overwhelming extent must it apply to the great reading public, to whom a story is simply a story, to be classed either as interesting or as uninteresting. The apparent paradox is that to the unformed and uninformed heterogeneity which we call the "popular taste," appeal may so often be made with confidence, in spite of, and even against all these general tendencies, not only by mere story-tellers, but by artists, provided they have the courage of their convictions and deal with something really vital. And this public verdict against momentary conditions has a co-ordinate value in determining the status of great work in fiction. The story which appeals only to the crowd is even by it recognized for what it is, whether the story passes its eightieth or its one hundred and eightieth thousand. But on the other hand, the novel which appeals only to the few is as finally recognized for its lack of the "deepest human interest," as our publisher says, which in an art that deals with life is a vital lack. A popular vogue, like that for the "happy ending," or for its reverse, is chiefly of consequence for its hidden dangers. The sincere artist recognizes his métier and, consciously at least, follows it stoutly. But the temptation to be easily and pleasingly conventional is none the less alluring. It was Stevenson first, among moderns, in the infinite painstaking of devotion to his art, who wrote of this temptation: "The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten), haunt and tempt our fancy, offer as ready-made but not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art.” THE FIELD OF ART THE CHICAGO ART INSTITUTE COLLEC- and twenty, and fall under the following I TION OF PAINTINGS REMEMBER being startled in 1899 by a remark of Dr. A. B. Meyer, the wellknown museum director of Dresden, that "the American public collections of modern pictures far surpassed any European collections with which he was acquainted." We were walking through the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Dr. Meyer had been inspecting the eastern American museums in behalf of the Saxon Government, which was contemplating the rebuilding or replacing of the famous Zwinger. For the first time my attention was called to what reflection showed to be true, that these recently formed American collections were among the most important and comprehensive collections in the world. Most of the foreign collections are confined to a single school. The paintings of the Chicago museum are much the most important part of the collections. Oil paintings are always the most popular part of any museum, and the management of the Art Institute is eminently popular. The collection of sculpture is extensive and representative, and especially strong in contemporary works and in architecture, but it is in large part composed of the familiar reproductions of standard subjects. The collections of original antique objects, classical and Egyptian, of textiles, jades, and Japanese and other Oriental objects, are more than respectable in quality, but are not extensive. It is upon the paintings that such title as the museum has to distinction must rest. heads. The old masters, chiefly Dutch; the Field collection of paintings, of the Barbizon school; the Munger collection, of diverse schools; the Nickerson collection, in which the paintings accompany a valuable collection of Oriental objects; the miscellaneous collection. There may be fifty pictures among these that can well be spared as the institution expands, but the most of the collection would be pronounced by any competent critic worthy of a public art gallery. The galleries themselves are well adapted to exhibition and the paintings are hung with plenty of space. As we enter the gallery of old masters certain reflections may well occur to us. This little group of pictures, numbering about thirty examples, including loans, is the only representation of the golden age of the art of painting accessible to millions and millions of people. Let the amateur recall his own excitement the first time he saw a real old master! It is like one's first cathedral, so laden with associations and romance as strangely to affect the sensibilities. It must be remembered that the people of the Middle West look to Chicago and not to New York as their capital. Here, then, they are to gain their first impressions of the art of the past, and here also we may see what kind of acquisitions the Art Institute will seek when it is untrammelled. The most important of these pictures were selected from the well-known collection of Prince Demidoff, of Florence, in 1890, and have been presented on the suggestion of the Art Institute by individual citizens, whose names are inscribed upon them. Most of them are by Dutch masters. In several cases, such as Hobbema and Van Ostade, they are among the most important works produced by the artist, and in every case they are good and adequate examples of the painter. Among the artists thus represented are Rembrandt, Hobbema, Van Ostade, Frans Hals, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ruysdael, Terburg, Teniers, Jan Steen, A. van de Velde, and Van Mieris. The Art Institute picture collection is not exempt from the influence of accident, to which all art museums are subject in their early days. Gifts and opportunities of acquisition have often fixed the character of accessions rather than selection upon a definite plan. Certain great advantages the institute has enjoyed from the beginning. It has had no bad inheritance; the gifts have in general been fortunate and they have often been guided by the management; no picture in the collection is so conditioned that it can- Perhaps the most important picture (and not be withdrawn whenever it is discredited. I am inclined to think it the most important The paintings number about two hundred in the whole museum) is the "Portrait of a Girl" by Rembrandt, a picture formerly called "The Child of the State," because the picturesque costume is that of the orphans of North Holland. The young woman, not exactly beautiful, but prepossessing, two-thirds length, and nearly full-front, rests her hands upon the cross-bar of a door and looks sidelong to the left. A coral necklace, deep red sleeves, and red lacings give color to the dress. It is of the middle period of Rembrandt and impresses the beholder not so much with the compelling and brilliant execution of "The Gilder" or of Mr. Ellsworth's "Portrait of a Man," as by a certain general suavity and richness. Its charm is one that will not tire. The "Water Mill" of Hobbema is one of his largest pictures and is of the first class a tile-roofed mill, water running from a sluice, much foliage, and sky. It has not the extreme and striking simplicity of composition of the picture in the National Gallery in London, "The Avenue, Middelharnis," but it has the atmosphere, the rural beauty, the full VOL. XL.-41 color, and especially the consistency and the pearly-gray envelopment which have caused modern critics to place Hobbema in the very front rank of landscape-painters. While Van Ostade was not of the class of Rembrandt and Hobbema, the little picture by him, "A Golden Wedding," less than twenty inches square, is probably the most costly picture in the museum. It is one of the artist's most elaborate and important works and is of the class of pictures sought by foreign museums. It represents peasants dancing and feasting. The jollity and naturalness of the scene will strike all observers, while the artist will stop to study the manner in which the numerous little rustic figures are put together and the whole immersed in air. "The Guitar Lesson" of Gerard ter Borch (or Terburg) is an entirely characteristic picture, not quite like that in the National Gallery, but so similar that it has been said to be a replica. The white satin and red velvet of the sitting lady, the dark clothes of the 381 |