written which fascinated the Western reader with pictures of our manners and customs, because they were so different from those with which he was familiar. Now all this is changed: the modern traveler is in nine cases out of ten a railroad speculator, or a mining engineer, or a financial promoter, or a concession-hunter, or perchance a would-be member of Parliament like yourself, coming to see how pecuniary or political capital can be made out of us, and how he can best exploiter the resources of the country to his own profit. This he calls 'reforming' it. His idea is, not how to make the people morally better, but how best to develop their predatory instincts, and teach them to prey upon each other's pockets. For he knows that, by encouraging a rivalry in the pursuits of wealth among a people comparatively unskilled in the art of moneygrubbing, his superior talent and experience in that occupation will enable him to turn their efforts to his own advantage. He disguises from himself the immorality of the proceeding by the reflection that the introduction of foreign capital will add to the wealth of the country and increase the material well-being and happiness of the people. But, apart from the fallacy that wealth and happiness are synonymous terms, reform of this kind rests on the assumption that natural temperament and religious tendencies of the race will lend themselves to a keen commercial rivalry of this description; and, if it does not, they, like the Australian and the Red Indian, must disappear before it. Already the process has begun in Europe. The Moslem is rapidly being reformed out of existence altogether. Between the upper and the nether millstone of Russian greed for territory and of British greed for money, and behind the mask of a prostituted Christianity, the Moslem in Europe has been ground to powder; hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children have either perished by violence or starvation, or, driven from their homes, are now struggling to keep body and soul together as best they can in misery and desolation, crushed beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of 'Progress'—their only crime, like that of the poor crossing-sweeper, I think, in one of your own novels, that they did not move on.' This is called in modern parlance 'the civilizing influence of Christianity.' At this moment the Russians are pushing roads through their newly acquired territory toward Kars. I am informed by an intelligent Moslem gentleman who has just arrived from that district that the effect of their 'civilizing' influence upon the inhabitants of the villages through which these roads pass is to convert the women into prostitutes and the men into drunkards. No wonder the Mohammedan population is flocking

in thousands across the frontier into Turkish territory, abandoning their homes and landed possessions in order to escape the contamination of anti-Christendom.

In these days of steam and electricity, not only has the traveler no eye for the moral virtues of a people, but his æsthetic faculties have become blunted; he regards them only as moneymaking machines, and he esteems them just in the degree in which they excel in the art of wealth-accumulation. Blinded by a selfish utilitarianism, he can now see only barbarism in a country where the landscape is not obscured by the black smoke of factory-chimneys, and the ear deafened by the scream of the locomotive. For him a people who cling to the manners and customs of a bygone epoch with which their own most glorious traditions are associated have no charm. He sees, in a race which still endeavors to follow the faith of their forefathers with simplicity and devotion, nothing but ignorant fanaticism, for he has long since substituted hypocrisy for sincerity in his own belief. He despises a peasantry whose instincts of submission and obedience induce them to suffer rather than rise in revolt against a government which oppresses them, because the head of it is invested in their eyes with a sacred character. He can no longer find anything to admire or to interest in the contrast between the East and West, but everything to condemn ; and his only sympathy is with that section of the population in Turkey who, called Christians like himself, like him devote themselves to the study of how much can be made, by fair means or foul, out of their Moslem neighbors.

"While I observe that this change has come over the Western traveler of late years—a change which I attribute to the mechanical appliances of the age-a corresponding effect, owing to the same cause, has, I regret to say, been produced upon my own countrymen. A gradual assimilation has been for some time in progress in the East with the habits and customs of the rest of Europe. We are abandoning our distinctive costume, and adapting ourselves to a Western mode of life in many ways. We are becoming lax in the observances of our religion; and it is now the fashion for our women to get their highheeled boots and bonnets from Paris, and for our youths of good family to go to that city of pleasure, or to one of the large capitals of Europe, for their education. Here they adopt all the vices of anti-Christendom, for the attractions of a civilization based upon enlightened selfishness are overpoweringly seductive, and they return without religion of any sort-shallow, skeptical, egoistical, and thoroughly demoralized. It is next to impossible for a Moslem youth, as I my

self experienced, to come out of that fire uncontaminated. His religion fits him to live with simple and primitive races, and even to acquire a moral control over them; but he is fascinated and overpowered by the mighty influence of the glamour of the West. He returns to Turkey with his principles thoroughly undermined, and, if he has sufficient ability, adds one to the number of those who misgovern it.

"The two dominant vices which characterize anti-Christendom are cupidity and hypocrisy. That which chiefly revolts the Turk in this disguised attack upon the morals of his people, no less than upon the very existence of his empire, is that it should be made under the pretext of morality and behind the flimsy veil of humanitarianism. It is in the nature of the religious idea that just in proportion as it was originally penetrated with a divine truth, which has become perverted, does it engender hypocrisy. This was so true of Judaism that, when the founder of Christianity came, though himself a Jew, he scorchingly denounced the class which most loudly professed the religion which they profaned. But the Phariseeism which has made war upon Turkey is far more intense in degree than that which he attacked, for the religion which it profanes contains the most divine truth which the world ever received. Mohammed divided the nether world into seven hells, and in the lowest he placed the hypocrites of all religions. I have now carefully examined into many religions, but, as none of them demanded so high a standard from its followers as Christianity, there has not been any development of hypocrisy out of them at all corresponding to that which is peculiar to anti-Christianity. For that reason I am constrained to think that its contributions to the region assigned to hypocrites by the Prophet will be out of all proportion to the hypocrites of other religions.

"In illustration of this, see how the principles of morality and justice are at this moment being hypocritically outraged in Albania, where, on the moral ground that a nationality has an inherent right to the property of its neighbor, if it can make a claim of similarity of race, a southern district of the country is to be forcibly given to Greece; while, in violation of the same moral principle, a northern district is to be taken from the Albanian nationality, to which by right of race it belongs, and violently and against the will of the people, who are in no way consulted as to their fate, is to be handed over for annexation to the Montenegrins—a race whom the population to be annexed traditionally hate and de

test.

'When anti-Christian nations, sitting in solemn congress, can be guilty of such a prostitution

of the most sacred principles in the name of morality, and construct an international code of ethics to be applicable to Turkey alone, and which they would one and all refuse to admit or be controlled by themselves—when we know that the internal corruption, the administrative abuses, and the oppressive misgovernment of the power which has just made war against us in the name of humanity have driven the population to despair, and the authorities to the most cruel excesses in order to repress them-and when, in the face of all this most transparent humbug, these antiChristian nations arrogate to themselves, on the ground of their superior civilization and morality, the right to impose reform upon Turkey-we neither admit their pretensions, covet their civilization, believe in their good faith, nor respect their morality.

"Thus it is that, from first to last, the woes of Turkey have been due to its contact with antiChristendom. The race is now paying the penalty for that lust of dominion and power which tempted them in the first instance to cross the Bosporus. From the day on which the tree of empire was planted in Europe, the canker, in the shape of the opposing religion, began to gnaw at its roots. When the Christians within had thoroughly eaten out its vitals, they called on the Christians without for assistance; and it is morally impossible that the decayed trunk can much longer withstand their combined efforts. But, as I commenced by saying, had the invading Moslems in the first instance converted the entire population to their creed, Turkey might have even now withstood the assaults of 'progress.' Nay, more, it is not impossible that her victorious armies might have overrun Europe, and that the faith of Islam might have extended over the whole of what is now termed the civilized world. I have often thought how much happier it would have been for Europe, and unquestionably for the rest of the world, had such been the case. That wars and national antagonisms would have continued is doubtless true; but we should have been saved the violent political and social changes which have resulted from steam and electricity, and have continued to live the simple and primitive life which satisfied the aspirations of our ancestors, and in which they found contentment and happiness, while millions of barbarians would to this day have remained in ignorance of the gigantic vices peculiar to anti-Christian civilization. The West would then have been spared the terrible consequences which are even now impending, as the inevitable result of an intellectual progress to which there has been no corresponding moral advance. The persistent violation for eighteen centuries of the great altruistic law propounded and enjoined by the great founder

of the Christian religion must inevitably produce a corresponding catastrophe; and the day is not far distant when modern civilization will find that in its great scientific discoveries and inventions, devised for the purpose of ministering to its own extravagant necessities, it has forged the weapons by which it will itself be destroyed. No better evidence of the truth of this can be found than in the fact that anti-Christendom alone is menaced with the danger of a great class revolution: already in every so-called Christian country we hear the mutterings of the coming storm, when labor and capital will find themselves arrayed against each other-when rich and poor will meet in deadly antagonism, and the spoilers and the spoiled solve, by means of the most recently invented artillery, the economic problems of modern 'progress.' It is surely a remarkable fact that this struggle between rich and poor is specially reserved for those whose religion inculcates upon them, as the highest law, the love of their neighbor, and most strongly denounces the love of money. No country which does not bear the name of Christian is thus threatened. Even in Turkey, in spite of its bad government and the many Christians who live in it, socialism, communism, nihilism, internationalism, and all kindred forms of class revolution, are unknown, for the simple reason that Turkey has so far, at least, successfully resisted the influence of 'anti-Christian civilization.'

"In the degree in which the state depends, for its political, commercial, and social well-being and prosperity, not upon a moral but a mechanical basis, is its foundation perilous. When the life-blood of a nation is its wealth, and the existence of that wealth depends upon the regularity with which railroads and telegraphs perform their functions, it is in the power of a few skilled artisans, by means of a combined operation, to strangle it. Only the other day the engineers and firemen of a few railroads in the United States struck for a week; nearly a thousand men were killed and wounded before the trains could be set running again; millions of dollars' worth of property was destroyed. The contagion spread to the mines and factories, and, had the movement been more skillfully organized, the whole country would have been in revolution, and it is impossible to tell what the results might have been. Combinations among the working classes are now rendered practicable by rail and wire, which formerly were impossible; and the facilities which exist for secret conspiracy have turned

Europe into a slumbering volcano, an eruption of which is rapidly approaching.

"Thus it is that the laws of retribution run their course, and that the injuries that anti-Christendom has inflicted upon the more primitive and simple races of the world, which—under the pretext of civilizing them-it has explored to its own profit, will be amply avenged. Believe me, my dear friend, that it is under no vindictive impulse or spirit of religious intolerance that I write thus: on the contrary, though I consider Mussulmans generally to be far more religious than Christians, inasmuch as they practice more conscientiously the teaching of their Prophet, I feel that teaching from an ethical point of view to be infinitely inferior to that of Christ. I have written, therefore, without prejudice, in this attempt philosophically to analyze the nature and causes of the collision which has at last culminated between the East and the West, between so-called Christendom and Islam. And I should only be too thankful if it could be proved to me that I had done the form of religion you profess, or the nation to which you belong, an injustice. I am far from wishing to insinuate that among Christians, even as Christianity is at present professed and practiced, there are not as good men as among nations called heathen and barbarous. I am even prepared to admit there are better-for some struggle to practice the higher virtues of Christianity, not unsuccessfully, considering the manner in which these are conventionally travestied; while others, who reject the popular theology altogether, have risen higher than ordinary modern Christian practice by force of reaction against the hypocrisy and shams by which they are surrounded-but these are in a feeble minority, and unable to affect the popular standard. Such men existed among the Jews at the time of Christ, but they did not prevent him from denouncing the moral iniquities of his day, or the church which countenanced them. At the same time, I must remind you that I shrank from the task which you imposed upon me, and only consented at last to undertake it on your repeated assurances that by some, at all events, of your countrymen, the spirit by which I have been animated in writing thus frankly will not be misconceived.

cerely,

"Believe me, my dear friend, yours very sin"A TURKISH EFFENDI." Blackwood's Magazine.

PAINTERS

assure us that the object most difficult to imitate is the living human skin. There needs no artist come from the studio to tell us this. Humble critics though we be, we can easily distinguish between the work of nature and the work of art. There have been painted draperies whose folds we could probe, goblets we could place to our lips, perspective interiors we might walk into, water we could bathe in, flowers and fruits whose perfumes we might inhale; but no face or form depicted upon a canvas has ever so far deceived the eye as to be mistaken for the reality.

Perhaps the most successful thing in the way of pictorial illusion ever attempted is the famous diorama of the siege of Paris in the Champs Elysées of the French capital. In that interesting work the painter, assisted by the mechanist, has produced that which, to the most practiced eye, seems a natural landscape, in which a real sky, real trees and buildings, real earthworks, and real cannons appear. Figures of men, painted on the flat surface of the canvas-upon which every object is traced except that which constitutes the foreground-stand out in marvelous relief, and, but for their faces, might pass for human soldiers. Here, however, art has failed, as we are not long in discovering that the representations under our gaze are of paint and not of flesh and blood.

Apelles, from whom so many ben trovato anecdotes in connection with art are derived, is reported to have painted a basket of fruit so accurately that birds came and pecked at it. It is, however, somewhat doubtful whether this may be accepted as evidence of the artist's skill, when we consider how easily duped are those members of the feathered tribe who mistake a clumsilyconstructed scarecrow for a live peasant, or a lump of chalk for a new-laid egg.

A far better instance of success in still-life painting is furnished by the story of George Morland, who, being unable to pay the reckoning at an inn, where the thriftless artist had halted during his vagrant wanderings, beat a hasty retreat by a low window. On the landlord entering the deserted chamber he beheld upon a table what appeared the untouched meal of his fraudulent visitor, but which was actually a painted representation of the food with its corresponding plates and dishes. The landlord, at first much aggrieved by the non-payment of his bill and the damage done to his furniture, was easily appeased when a certain connoisseur, who happened to

call at the inn, offered to purchase the painted table for a price which more than compensated the owner.

Fiddles, flies, dead game, and other objects have been imitated with such fidelity as to be regarded by all persons beholding them as original or natural productions, and in a church on the Continent (I think at Genoa) there is a wall so cunningly painted as to lead the spectator to believe that he is gazing, not upon a flat surface, but upon a continuation of the sacred interior.

Several pages might be devoted to a record of similar art illusions in reference to inanimate subjects, but, of stories in which the representation of a human countenance has passed muster for the living reality, the majority are fabulous, while the best authenticated have usually been connected with certain external circumstances which have in some way assisted in the deception. It is related of Titian's portrait of Charles V. that, when viewed for the first time in a semidarkened chamber near a table at which it was placed, the son of the Emperor began to converse with it, being under the impression that he was addressing his own father. Under similar circumstances did Cardinal Pescia kneel before Raffaele's likeness of Leo X. and present to it bulls for signature, believing the picture to be the Pope himself.

Sculptors have endeavored to give life and animation to their marble productions by the employment of paint, and by tinting the eyes and hair; waxworks have also done their best to deceive the eye in various ways; and a word might be said of that wonderful flesh-color which in our youth was intimately associated with our dolls, our toy theatres, our pantomimes, our Guy Fawkeses, and our silk stockings; but to these and other efforts to reproduce the human epidermis the moral saying, "Flesh is weak," might not unfitly be applied.

Since the time of Giotto and Cimabue the list of painters who have been remarkable as colorists is very small indeed. Michael Angelo, though a giant in all else that he attempted, was certainly not what is understood as a colorist, and since Michael Angelo lived there have been innumerable artists who have succeeded in every department of art except that of flesh-painting. Such striking exceptions as Titian, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Velasquez, Murillo, Paul Veronese, Giorgione, the Carracci, Correggio, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Etty, have been few and far between; and in more modern times, when art

competition has been greater than ever it was, painters of their rank have been even proportionately rarer.

Of those who have mastered the difficult department of color a distinction must again be made between the limner of youth and the limner of age; for there are many who fail in the one and yet succeed notably in the other. Thus it not unfrequently happens that a portrait-painter is far happier as a delineator of men than of women and children, and vice versa. Rembrandt himself is best known by his pictures of elderly people, belonging, for the most part, to the least comely class; though it might easily be presumed that so great a master of color and character was capable of accomplishing almost anything with the brush.

No subject is open to more controversy than that of flesh-painting, for every artist, unless he follow a particular school or master, has his own way of viewing nature. Give a dozen brothers of the brush the same model to copy from, and, though the result may in each case be satisfactory, no two will be found to resemble each other in point of tone, harmony, and modus operandi. To one the object before him has appeared somber and subdued; to another all is bright, vivid, and fresh; a third has been impressed by gray and pearly tones; a fourth has gazed as through a mist or a glass which is dimmed by frost; while a fifth has observed as if a magnifier interposed between him and the object he has striven to imitate.

Upon one canvas the colors will have been thickly and firmly laid, exhibiting such roughness and impasto that the picture can be adequately judged of only at a given distance. Upon another the hues have been placed lightly and thinly, displaying the utmost smoothness and delicacy. The flesh-tints belonging to this work have been secured only after many coats of paint have been applied, assisted by thin glazes of color and oil administered toward the finish; those appertaining to this have been accomplished at once without any preparatory groundwork or subsequent retouching.

To the first of these two opposite methods belong the Titian and Reynolds schools; to the last those of Velasquez, Vandyke, and the more modern painter Fortuny.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, after much study of his favorite masters and many studio experiments, arrived at the conclusion that the human epidermis, with its lights and shadows, its middle-tints and grays, could best be imitated with the fewest and simplest colors. He was in the habit of dissecting, as it were, the flesh-tints of his predecesThus he would discover that a certain head by Correggio was painted in "dead-colored white,

sors.

with black or ultramarine in the shadows; and over that is scumbled thinly and smooth a warmer tint." Similarly the Adonis of Titian in the Colonna Palace he describes as being composed of "dead-colored white, with the muscles marked bold; the second painting has scumbled a lightcolor over it; the lights a mellow flesh-color; the shadows in the light parts of a faint purple hue; at least, they were so at first. That purple hue seems occasioned by blackish shadows under, and the color scumbled over them. . . . I copied the Titian," he adds, "with white, umber, minio, cinnabar, and black; the shadows thin of color." In a memorandum-book which the English portrait-painter kept in the year 1755, when he was receiving only five guineas for a head, is entered the following recipe for flesh-painting: "Black, blue-black, white, lake, carmine, orpiment, yellow ochre, ultramarine, and varnish." At a later period Reynolds altered his system, as it is pretty generally known that for his flesh he employed raw umber, Indian red, Vandyke brown, yellow ochre, raw sienna, vermilion, crimson lake, ivory-black, blue-black, and flake-white. Strange to say, some of these pigments are altogether avoided by more than one great colorist.

All colors were equally valuable to the late Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, whose coloring was as brilliant and true to nature as his drawing was graceful and accurate. His method of work consisted, so to speak, in the absence of all conventional method. He was what is termed a "once" painter-that is, he endeavored to match the object before him at once, without any preliminary groundwork or subsequent retouching. His work was accomplished piecemeal, one portion being completed at a single sitting before a fresh portion was begun. It is well known that if a head or any part thereof did not "come right," as artists term it, before the day's labor was over, Fortuny would wipe or scrape it clean off the canvas and begin afresh on another occasion.

Fortuny was one of the few painters who have succeeded in producing work which will bear close inspection, and yet appear equally effective when viewed at a distance. This is generally admitted to be one of the most difficult things to accomplish in art, as it very frequently happens that a picture, however carefully executed and highly finished, will lose half its charm when a few yards interpose between it and the spectator, while a work which has been broadly treated, and can not possibly be approached, will, when inspected at a distance, seem smooth and sufficiently complete.

In one of the galleries at Florence there is a man's head painted with such extraordinary attention to detail that every hair, over as well as