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under the brow, might be counted, and the shaven portion of the face, which is represented by innumerable dots corresponding with those observable in a man's beardless countenance, might be similarly reckoned. In the same manner are the pores of the skin so faithfully transcribed as to bear inspection through the most powerful magnifying-glass, and the eyes are treated in such a way that an oculist might study them with advantage.

After contemplating this remarkable production, the spectator wonders whether art has not achieved its completest triumph, and whether it is possible to match nature more accurately. But, with all its marvelous elaboration, and deceptive as the work actually is when closely examined, many of its merits disappear and give place to blemishes when the picture is observed at a given distance. For some reason, which a painter or a connoisseur might explain, the flesh appears as if composed of cream or wax.

Some artists have pet colors, so to speak, which they use more freely than any others, and thus it is that painters of reputation are easily recognized by the prevailing tone of their work. Here is one for whom brown seems an indispensable pigment; here is another who appears to accomplish nothing without a brick-dust red; a third luxuriates in cream color and buff; while, for a fourth, hues resembling brimstone and treacle seem to have a strange fascination. On the other hand, there are those who cherish a positive antipathy to certain colors, and who declare war to the (palette) knife, now to Vandyke brown, now to Indian red, to burnt sienna, to Antwerp blue or to crimson lake, pigments which to some are indispensable.

Most strange and varied are the hues employed by artists, and to the unlearned in such matters it seems incomprehensible how some of them should actually be required to do duty, especially in the portrayal of a human countenance. The very names are in many cases unfamiliar. It would perhaps never occur to the outsider that "mummy," which he had always associated with Egyptian embalmments, was a brown used by some artists for their shadows. He might well be puzzled to comprehend what difference there existed between this color and bone brown, or between the latter and Capphah brown, manganese brown, Prout's brown, Vandyke brown, Verona brown, madderine brown, and madder brown. As well might he be expected to distinguish between flake white, Chinese white, permanent white, silver white, barytes white; cremnitz white, white lead, and zinc white; or, to explain the precise nature of ceruleum, verdigris, cobalt, orpiment, cadmium, oxide of chromium, smalt, bistre, Cassel earth, verditer, aureolin, Italian

pink, and Rubens's madder. It would scarcely be surprising if such a one were in doubt whether burnt sienna, mars orange, Chinese orange, lemon yellow, burnt brown ochre, warm sepia, sugar of lead, and dragon's blood were not connected with fruit and confectionery, or whether violet carmine and burnt carmine did not belong to heroines and martyrs of romance. Yet these and many equally strange names are perfectly comprehensible to artists-more particularly to those who follow the departments of landscape and water-colors.

Wilkie's favorite pigment was asphaltum, or bitumen, which at one period he used unsparingly not only in his flesh-shadows but in other portions of his work. This rich, transparent brown, which has a strange fascination for most artists, is, nevertheless, a most pernicious pigment, being far from permanent, with a tendency to crack and discolor, as is too clearly shown in many a chef-d'œuvre of our Scottish genre painter.

From the earliest periods there have been fashions in art as in everything else, and hence have arisen what are called schools of painting. An artist has but to make himself remarkable for some distinguishable feature in his art, and his manner will soon become popular.

Let him transcribe nature as if seen through a microscope, which his critics and admirers, for want of a better title, call pre-Raphaelitism, and soon there will gather a small army of enthusiasts, dubbing themselves pre-Raphaelites, who paint after the same pattern. In a few years the popular one alters his views and adopts the broad or slap-dash style, in direct opposition to that hitherto approved of. Then the pre-Raphaelites, dropping their microscopes, assume the whitewash-brush, and lay on their colors after the fashion of scene-painters.

Some one presently discovers that animate nature is best copied in the open air—an example previously set by Titian and other early masters-and forthwith a number of gentlemen of the brush, quitting their comfortable studios, betake themselves to the house-tops or to back-gardens, and pose their models al fresco; or the master may be impressed by the belief that human flesh shows to best advantage when more than half enveloped by shadow, in which case his enthusiastic followers place their subjects against the solitary window of a dimly lighted chamber and abandon themselves to somberness and gloom.

Most artists attach great importance to the backgrounds of their pictures. There are those who have a preference for a bright-blue sky or a cloudy and stormy firmament, while others show off their flesh-tints against a deep, rich crimson ground, a dark brown, or an invisible green.

Others again consider drab, yellow, or stone-color of the sitter found to her surprise that her husmore becoming. band had not only one hat on his head but another under his arm!

The painting of a head with its harmonious surroundings might not inappropriately be compared to a dramatic performance, in which the leading character is rendered more striking when well supported by those who fill subordinate parts and by the scenic accessories. Some painters will, however, sacrifice everything in their work which might otherwise tend to destroy the brilliancy and vividness of their flesh-tints, and hence portrait-painters are frequently careless in the matter of hands, dress, and other things.

The unfortunate artist who has not yet risen to eminence and consequent independence of action in his profession is often sadly restricted in this respect, when certain of his patrons insist upon the introduction or suppression of details which as frequently as not prove fatal to his fame. Queen Elizabeth, in sitting for her portrait, made it a condition that the artist should introduce no positive shadow in her royal countenance, and hence posterity is left with a flat as well as a flattered representation of her Majesty. The Chinese monarch who regarded the shaded side of Romney's portrait of George III. as so much dirt is another instance of the difficulties which an artist encounters in the matter of satisfying patrons.

Reynolds has left many stories in connection with fastidious sitters. One of these refers to a gentleman who desired to be painted with his hat on his head instead of in his hand, the latter position being more customary at the period when Sir Joshua chose conventional attitudes after the manner of his old master Hudson. It is said that when the likeness was sent home the wife

Others besides Reynolds could doubtless supply innumerable stories of a similar character. What portrait-painter has not met with the double-chinned dowager who declines to have that superfluity of her face introduced in her picture on the score of unbecomingness, or the lady with the prominent teeth who will not be represented with an open mouth. How often have not gray hair been converted into raven black, green eyes into celestial blue, sallow skins into pink-andwhite complexions, and corpulent busts into slim and graceful figures? What limner of faces has not been requested to be particular respecting the "pleasing" but artificial smirk of his sitter, and to bear in mind that there is actually no "tone" or "depth," as the artist would have it, on her fair countenance, but that it is white even unto chalkiness, just as her skin is smooth and highly polished, and not rough and thick with paint, as in the picture?

How many gaudy costumes, jewel-bedecked fingers, impossible accessories, have not been insisted upon by patron or patroness, who is indifferent whether the predominance of blue or any other vivid color does or does not spoil the general harmony of the picture?

With such difficulties to contend with, there is little wonder if a young and promising portrait-painter frequently fails in the matter of his flesh-color. With a slight paraphrase of the poet, one might say of him and his handiwork, "Let him paint an inch thick, to this complexion it must come." All the Year Round.

OW

LIFE AT HIGH PRESSURE.

How comes it that so many great men, men which from eight cylinders can print and fold

that have been great benefactors of their kind and have left great works behind them, have had to live under pressure, with strained energies, and the sense of having too much to do? It seems as if men could hardly become great under the conditions of a calm, leisurely life. A man can not run at his fastest, or swim his farthest, in ordinary circumstances; he must be running in an exciting race, or swimming for dear life, to do his best. It rarely appears what a man is capable of till he is put to his mettle. Necessity is a wonderful educator, a wonderful enlarger and quickener of men's faculties. We lately read an account of a printing-machine

about a hundred thousand newspapers in an hour. What but the pressure of necessity could ever have made machinery accomplish such wonders? It needs something of the same sort to take the most out of human faculties. Under the pressure, the faculties become enlarged and quickened, and are thus capable of producing results that calm leisure never attains.

Still it is true that overwork is an evil. It is more-it is often a murderer. Sir Walter Scott, Sir James Simpson, Dr. Norman Macleod, and many others certainly did not live to the end of their days, and it was overwork that robbed them of the residue. No doubt, as is often said, it is

not work but worry that does the mischief. But worry is the daughter of overwork; it is having too little time to be patient that gives the feeling of worry; it is having the nerves so stretched that the slightest opposition frets them. When a celebrated editor complained of being

"Overworked, overworried,

Over-Croker'd, over-Murray'd,"

the first word of his lamentation explained all the rest. Undoubtedly, then, overwork, while a means to good, is itself an evil. A distinguished man of our acquaintance used to say that the most desirable condition of life was to have just somewhat more to do than you could possibly accomplish. Not far too much, for that would crush you; but enough to check the tendency to laziness, enough to supply a perpetual spur. The evil is, that it is so difficult to realize this happy condition; men who are able to do much are usually pressed to do far too much; and the warning which so often comes in the form of paralysis or of heart-disease comes too late to admit of a remedy.

It must be accepted, we apprehend, as the true state of things that, while there are evils inseparable from high pressure and overwork, the best that a strong man is capable of can not be done without them. Let us observe, for example, how careful an overworked man is to make the most of his time. What an early riser he becomes! Can anything make a man start from the luxury of a half-waking, half-sleeping state in bed like the conviction that if he is not at work at a given minute the whole business of the day will be thrown into arrear and inevitable confusion? Dickens has a character somewhere who says he always goes to bed with regret and rises with disgust. The pressure of work removes both the regret and the disgust, for at bedtime bed is welcome to the busy worker, while in the morning it is a thief and a robber. How much more rapidly one runs through the newspaper when there is but ten minutes for it; or how much more quickly one transacts business, or makes inquiries, or goes through friendly greetings, when dozens are waiting in the anteroom, let doctors and lawyers say. "Don't go to men of leisure when you want anything done -go to busy men," was a saying of the late George Moore's, of Bow Churchyard, himself a busy man, the architect of a colossal business, and yet able to carry on his shoulders the interests of innumerable charities. In the United States they have a rule in some of their conventions that speakers shall not occupy more than two minutes. It seems to many as if a speaker would need that time at least to clear his throat; and yet it is wonderful what can be said in two

minutes when neither love nor money can eke out the allowance.

Besides saving time, the pressure of work makes the mental machinery go faster. The mind comes under an excitement which quickens all its processes. The steam gets up, and the piston flies through the cylinder like lightning. Pieces of work have been done in these moods that would not or could not have been done under more still and quiet conditions. If St. Paul had not led so busy a life, his epistles would have borne a different character. They would not have the stimulating power they have. The rush and rapidity of the apostle's mind communicates itself to his readers. The same thing is true, in a sense, of the speeches of most great orators. Such things could not be produced in cold blood. Men must be on wings to do them. If the rocket were not discharged in a sort of frantic excitement, it would not describe the beautiful curve which it traces. It is certain that the leisure which busy men so naturally crave would greatly restrict and impair many of their greatest efforts. Their work might indeed be done with more finish and beauty of detail, but it would have far less of the living and quickening power to which, very probably, its chief value is due. No doubt, if sober thought be the chief thing needed in a piece of work, the slower it is done the better; a judge must be deliberate, and solemn, and slow; but, if the purpose be to illuminate, to quicken, to impel, the mind will be all the better of the excitement that comes from the pressure of too much to do.

When able men are urged on in this way, it is wonderful what they can do even in their hora subseciva. Sometimes it seems as if they could never stop. They go on like the Flying Dutchman, as if they were embodiments of the perpetual motion. There is Mr. Gladstone, for example. No sooner is he relieved of the burden of the premiership than he is up to the neck in Homer. When people are wondering how he gets time to keep up his Greek, he is out with an elaborate pamphlet on Ultramontanism. Hardly is the ink dry when a publication is announced on the Turkish massacres. And, when people are thinking him fairly exhausted, he goes through an electioneering campaign like a meteor, and delivers a succession of speeches, that for every quality of powerful and brilliant oratory fill the whole world with astonishment. We suppose that in his best days a similar activity must have characterized Lord Brougham. When could he have written his papers for the Useful Knowledge Society, or studied and written his chapters on Paley's "Natural Theology"? The sparks from such men's anvils are equal to the chief products of ordinary craftsmen. But even these men

would probably have been eclipsed by the activity of the Spanish poet, Lope de Vega. It was calculated that twenty-one million three hundred thousand of his lines were actually printed, and no less than eighteen hundred plays of his composition acted upon the stage. "Were we to give credit to such accounts," says Lord Holland, "allowing him to begin his compositions at the age of thirteen, we must believe that on an average he wrote more than nine hundred lines a day; a fertility of imagination and a celerity of pen which, when we consider the occupations of his life as a soldier, a secretary, a master of a family, and a priest, his acquirements in Latin, Italian, and Portuguese, and his reputation for erudition, become not only improbable, but absolutely, and one may say physically, impossible."

With such cases before us, we come more readily to understand the paradox that the busiest men are those who have most time, or at least most capacity, for extra work. The medical profession is full of instances. It is remarkable that the late Sir James Simpson, for instance, in the midst of an unprecedented professional practice should have been a keen antiquary, and should have found time to write so many antiquarian memoirs. It is said of the late Dr. Abercrombie, that his works on the "Intellectual and Moral Powers of Man" were composed in his carriage, as he was driving to see his patients. The instances of medical men in the height of practice writing papers for the medical journals, or preparing professional works for the press, are very numerous. The faculties of such men are so ready that in their moments of leisure they can do more than many another man who has no stated work at all. Even ordinary men understand quite well how irksome a very small bit of work, like the writing of letters, is in a holidaytime, when one is idle in the country; whereas, in the height of one's activity, a dozen letters could be dashed off in an hour, and not even counted in the hard work of the day. An able man, in the full swing of his manifold work, is like a machine that by belts and wheels can do all kinds of by-jobs, besides what engages the chief share of its activity.

Nor is such a life necessarily so oppressive as is often thought. Our Maker has so ordered it that one of our chief pleasures is derived from work successfully done. Labor ipse voluptas. There is always a gratification in "something accomplished, something done." Lope de Vega, writing his play in a single day, as he often did, had no doubt sufficient enjoyment in it to compensate him for all the confinement and toil. Rapid workers have not time to get disgusted with their work, as those are apt to do who

VOL. VIII.-18

brood over it. Disgust is usually the product of leisure and reflection, and comes at a second stage. If the work be somewhat varied, the pleasure in connection with its completion is varied too. Hence, perhaps, is the reason why the total and sudden giving up of work is often attended with evil results. The transition from a life full of activity and rich in the enjoyment of successful labor to a life of absolute idleness with no such vivid enjoyment has often proved fatal. There is too little activity in the new life, and too little of the pleasure of activity. Idleness, without the excitement and pleasure of work, becomes depressing. The vital forces droop and decay. On the other hand, to the busy worker, rest and recreation have a double relish. No holiday is so refreshing as that in which he runs away from his labors, and enjoys himself in quite a different scene. Swiss mountains and Swiss air have then a double charm. The interval is too short to produce the ennui that attends permanent separation from active pursuits. Few things live in the memory more vividly than the first month in Switzerland in the heart of a too busy life.

Too much to do, besides its direct effect on the busy worker, exposes him to certain inconveniences apt to escape the notice of others. One of these is the effect produced on his memory. One who leads a rushing life, who has to hurry from one thing to another, and from one person to another without a moment's interval, can not have a vivid remembrance of many things that happen in his experience. He is necessarily liable to forget, in a way that another can not understand. Many a busy physician has found himself at times in serious trouble from this cause. He has made a promise to a patient, but, before the promise had hardened in his memory, some exciting case has hurried him away, obliterated the impression, and the promise has been forgotten. Authors' memories have been known from a similar cause to play them strange tricks. We know an author who was engaged in writing a book amid many other absorbing occupations. For some weeks the book had to be laid aside. When leisure came, he resumed it, as he thought, at the point where he had broken it off, and got through a considerable chapter, when, to his mingled amazement and amusement, he found in his drawer another manuscript, almost precisely similar, the existence of which he had quite forgotten. So strange and incredible are these tricks of memory that sometimes the most honest of men, if examined in a court of justice, would hardly be believed. The non mi ricordo would hardly be accepted by those who have had little experience of the difficulty of carrying in the memory impressions

which have not had time to photograph themselves on its tablets, or have been blurred by other impressions following too quickly.

If a busy man is guilty of some neglect, leisurely people are apt to fancy an intentional slight where nothing of the kind was dreamed of. In the case of such a man, there is a twofold reason for applying the rule which Elizabeth Barrett, in one of her letters to Mr. Horne, thus gracefully acknowledged: "In one letter was something about neglect; you told me never to fancy a silence into a neglect. Was I likely to do it? Was there any room for even fancy to try? That would be still more surprising than the fact of your making room for a thought of me in the multitude of your occupations."

In the "Life of Charlotte Brontë," if we remember rightly, it is told how once, at the beginning of her literary life, she took it into her head that an eminent publisher was dissatisfied, because he did not at once acknowledge and answer a letter accompanying a manuscript. At Haworth it was not easy to understand the ways of Cornhill or Paternoster Row. We can fancy the grim smile on the face of the publisher, overwhelmed in all likelihood with letters, manuscripts, proofs, books, bills, and business of every sort, at the gentle impatience of the lady. Most publishers, and editors too, have doubtless had rather amusing experiences of the innocent impatience of correspondents. Letters to the editor often run as if the poor man had nothing whatever to do from morn to dewy eve but at tend to their papers. He may be struggling, like a dray-horse in an overloaded wagon, to overtake the piles of crabbed handwriting in prose and verse that burden his table, ranging from essays in Chinese metaphysics to lines on a snowdrop, and possibly, in regard to a given paper, thinking of inserting it in the course of the season, when down comes a thundering epistle demanding why it did not appear in the last number. Well, the impatience of correspondents is 'not always innocent. Some have a spiteful pleasure in stinging the editor for "rejecting" what the unhappy man never asked. If he had only time, he might explain things, and perhaps pacify them; but perhaps not. Editors, we suppose, must submit to be counted tyrants, and probably fools to boot, by a large proportion of the ill-fated volunteers to whose surpassing merits they are so often inveterately blind.

More amusing are the strange fancies that some persons have as to what overworked men may be asked to do for them. In the very thick of the American war, there came to President Lincoln an Illinois farmer, in a great state of excitement about a pair of horses that one of Lincoln's generals had requisitioned for the war.

The owner was, of course, entitled to compensation, but somehow it had not come. Going to the President, he told him his story, and was rather chagrined to be told that it did not lie with him to pay the money. "Then," says the farmer, "will you undertake to write to the General, and see that the matter is settled properly?" Poor Lincoln, who never wanted a story to help him in an emergency, was ready for his visitor. "When I was a rail-splitter," he said, "there lived near us a smart young fellow, the captain of a Mississippi boat, who could steer a vessel over the rapids with wonderful skill, as hardly any one else could. One day, when he was grasping the wheel with his utmost strength, at the most critical point of the rapids, a little boy came running up to him in great excitement and said, 'Cap'n, stop your ship, my apple has fallen overboard!'" In the "Life of Sir James Simpson" there are some curious notices of the extraordinary things that patients in the country would sometimes ask him to do. Once a gentleman wrote to him asking him to send him a copy of the prescription which he had given him some years before, when the doctor could hardly recall the man, much less the prescription. Others would ask him to go to Duncan and Flockhart's, and get them some particular medicine. A very busy clergyman of our acquaintance, when over head and ears with many things, once got a letter from a stranger in the United States, explaining that more than a century ago some one of the name of G― owned a property near Edinburgh which was believed to have been destined by will in a particular way, so that the relatives in America thought they had some claim to it. He was requested to inquire into the matter, find out about the will, communicate with the present owners of the property, and put everything in train for a just settlement of the claim. It would have been reasonable for the writer to inclose a bill for five hundred dollars, but that, unfortunately, he omitted to do.

Unreasonable though it be to plague overworked men in this way, it is very interesting to find such men volunteering, in the midst of a hundred other things, to do some useful service to the friendless or the poor. Nothing could have been kinder, for example, than the act of Sir Walter Scott, writing out sermons for a young aspirant to the Scottish ministry, whose state of nerves made him unable to grapple with the task, and satisfy his presbytery. Similar, though in a quite different sphere, was the kindness shown by Vinet, at Lausanne, to a peasant-woman who invaded his solitude one Sunday morning. Overcome by toil and illness, Vinet had been obliged to forbid the visits of strangers, and his family were guarding him with all possible care. The

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