sion. We shall be wise especially if we avoid a general argument with the French. For the French, as we have said, are not apt for politics, though they have always loyally interchanged with us their views, alert and wise, of the Arts. Mr Huddleston in his book seems to miss this prudent limitation in the French. "The French," he writes, "idealists as they are, held firm at Verdun because they believed in the universal triumph of democracy. They felt themselves to be free men fighting for freedom." They believed, we are sure, in none of these irrelevancies. When they were fighting the Boche, the Aunt Sally of Democracy was never before their eyes. They never wasted a thought on the wild chimæra of freedom. They had a dozen better reasons than these for what they did and suffered. They were stirred by the love of their soil; the great traditions of their race and art; by a hatred of the Boche, their secular enemy; by the thought of their lofty legend: On ne passe pas. Such trivial and inflammatory words as freedom and democracy were never on the tongues of men fighting for their lives, their history, and their homes. He who writes these words spent some days in the fortress of Verdun in the autumn of 1917. He heard many things discussed the follies of the Germans, poets and poetry, the political philosophy of Charles Maurras, the brave sentiment ality of Péguy, the necessity of holding firm-that, indeed, was taken for granted; but there was no mention of democracy. How should there be democracy meant Malvy and Caillaux ? Nor of freedom, which could have had at that time but one meaning, the freeing of French soil from the German hoof, and that duty was accepted without speech. Of the good that is done by two peoples coming together upon the ground of art, we have an admirable example in the exhibition of Flemish and Belgian art which is being held at Burlington House. Such a pageant as is here displayed by Belgium would be beyond the compass of most other countries. How can we fail to take a pride in the reflection that the descendants of the great painters here represented were our allies in the war? The history of painting in Belgium is a marvel, as the masterpieces of the earliest painters of Belgium are marvels. In 1420 Hubert van Eyck began the noble triptych of St Bavon. His was the idea, his the plan. He executed a part of it himself, and died in 1426. His brother Jan carried the work to completion, founded at Bruges the school which bore their name, and in 1440 he too died. Thus as Fromentin has written, has written, "in twenty years the human spirit represented by these two men found in painting the ideal expression of their beliefs, the clearest expression of the faces of men, not the most noble but the first and correct manifestation by true colours of bodies and their exact forms, the first image of the sky, of the air, of the fields, of garments, of rich materials; it created a living art, invented or perfected its mechanism, fixed a language, and produced imperishable works." In brief, Hubert and Jan van Eyck were the Homers of pictorial art; and who shall say that they were not, like Homer, the greatest of their kind? the More than this: the Van Eycks had for a pupil, after the interval of one generation, a painter almost as great as themselves, Memling, whose masterpieces have ever re- favour-beauty, elegance, magmained the glory of the hospital of Saint Jean at Bruges. The exquisite casket on which Memling depicted scenes of the life of St Ursula is a curiosity of art, within its scale and measure unrivalled. His His "Marriage of Saint Catherine is on a grander scale and of a loftier inspiration. It need not fear the rivalry of Italy or Spain. What can be expected of a school which began with mastery? Only that its formula should decline to tastelessness, and that its scholars should look elsewhere to renew a worn inspiration, as the Flemish painters looked to Italy. And then the art of painting deserted the cloister for the court. The Belgians ceased to paint triptychs and to illustrate the legends of the church. They sought subjects among nificent gifts, a precocious chase horses, luxury, ruinous decessor's high-hearted gaiety gallantries; violently amorous and love of elegance in life of his art, and sacrificing it and art. So fine a painter was to less noble passions, to less he that, though he died no faithful loves, to less happy longer ago than 1906, his works attachments with the airs must already be accepted, in of a Don Juan rather than of a humble admiration, as those hero, with a touch of melan- of an established master. Uncholy, and, as it were, a ground happily, his little masterpieces of sadness piercing through are surrounded upon the wall the gaieties of his life." It is of Burlington House by coman engaging portrait, which the panions wholly unworthy of bold elegance of his portraits his genius. seems to justify. As we have said, nothing With Van Dyck the art of could attach us more closely Belgium culminated. Thereafter to Belgium than such an exthe fantastic ingenuities of hibition as this. Could we Breughel aroused the connois- not next year, in the same seurs of Europe, and then a place and at the same time, blight fell upon Flemish art, gather together a collection of as upon the art of most other French pictures, selected from countries. Only once did the all schools and ages, which ancient spirit of Van Dyck would reveal to England the and the masters revive in Bel- mastery, easy and various, of gium, and that was when Alfred our neighbours? It would be Stevens was born, well-nigh a a hard task of selection, and century ago. He, too, like it would do both countries Van Dyck, was a grand seig- far more good than an idle neur, with much of his pre- exchange of political views. Printed in Great Britain by INDIAN RIVER SCHOOL A Preparatory School of Northern Ideals for boys 12 to 15. Each boy is supplied with and cares for his own horse. Outdoor life. 12 miles south of Daytona. Two hundred acre ranch. Catalog on request. WAYNE E. 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