who ape society manners, and servants who fancy themselves above their station, are such perennial types that, to this day, "Les Précieuses Ridicules" never fails to call forth peals of laughter. Imagine, then, the sensation it created when the very people ridiculed were seated in the boxes! The dialogue between the false marquis and his precious dupes might have passed for a model conversation at one of Mlle. de Scudéry's Saturdays; flowery love verse, too, received its coup de grâce when languishing Mascarille composed this impromptu quatrain in tribute to Magdelon:

Oh, oh! quite careless of your charm, My heart, without a thought of harm, Was stolen by your glance so liefStop thief, stop thief, stop thief, stop thief! Too many poets had indulged in superfine expression of the tender passion; too many butterflies of society had figured in the rôle of alcôviste, for the fashionable playgoer not to appreciate Molière's satire, even though it cut to the quick. Henceforth, a précieuse, whether illus trious, great, or small, could not fail to be ridiculous as well.

"Les Précieuses Ridicules" sounded the death-knell of affectation on the stage as

well as in society. Accustomed to classic tragedy or Italian farce, the audience. could scarcely believe its life-like characters were in a play. Their very names, too, were those of the actors on the stage: Magdelon was Madeliene Béjart; Cathos, Catherine de Brie; La Grange and Du Croisy, two players with those names. Jodelet, the lean fariné from the Théâtre du Marais, with somber doublet buttoned to his chin in the style of the old court, and a huge, false beard upon his whitened face, played the Vicomte de Jodelet; while Mascarille, the swaggering, insolent, swaggering, insolent, masquerading valet in love with his own vanity, was Molière himself.

An eye-witness of that first performance thus describes Molière's droll makeup:

His wig was so huge that it swept the floor every time he bowed, and his hat so small that it is easy to see why he carried it in his hand more often than upon his head. His cravat might have served for a dressing-gown; and as for his canons, children might have used them to play hide-and-seek in. A bunch of tassels dangled from his pocket as though it were a horn of plenty; and his shoes were so covered with ribbons that you could not tell whether

During the preceding century, the Seigneur de Montaigne, a country gentleman who, in his own words, "had done no more than nibble at the outside crust of learning," began to write what he termed 'essays," in a style intended as a prctest against the stilted and artificial literature of the day. According to his own estimation, "he wrote a little of everything and nothing complete, in true French fashion," but he took a fair and comprehensive view of life and, through that very quality, truth, became, unconsciously, the dean of modern letters. One can not read him without being impressed with the modernness of his point of view; nor can one see Molière played without feeling that, in spite of their ribbons, canons and feathered fans, his characters are the men and women whom we meet

daily. Their talk is quaint, maybe, but their ambitions, foibles, and philosophy of life are modern.

Naturalness, the very quality that distinguishes Montaigne, constitutes the charm of Molière's work. He knew humanity in all its phases and, being blessed with the courage of his convictions, he, too, wrote in protest of the stilted and artificial, "in true French fashion." Until "Les Précieuses Ridicules" appeared, he was bound by Italian fetters; but henceforth, he was steadfast in his Gallic loyalty. If, at moments, his work became objectively Italian, his point of view was subjective, his technic French. Truth was his ideal; and with "Les Précieuses Ridicules" as foundation, he built, from the farcical ruins of the past, his eternal city, a Rome to which the roads of modern comedy all lead.

Henri Becque, from whom the best French dramatists of to-day, such as Paul Hervieu and Maurice Donnay, receive their inspiration, derived his technic from profound studies of Molière's charactercomedy. Complications, catastrophe, and

dénouement should be attenuated by atmosphere and character drawing. The analysis of events must give place to the analysis of persons, exclaim these modern Frenchmen; likewise, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Echegaray. These are not new principles, however;

Molière taught them nearly three centuries ago. turies ago. Indeed, the closer a playwright studies the great Frenchman, the less likely is he to fall into the purely theatric rut of situation, as distinguished from the loftier dramatic ideals of atmosphere and characterization.

BY

QUOAD HE LAND OF REMBRANDT" is what Busken Huet, supreme stylemaster in the Dutch language, calls his own and the painter's birthland. The world's greatest artist in light and shadows never went out of the Netherlands. As Japan has risen like a sun on the world's history in the twentieth, so in the sixteenth century, the Dutch republic astonished Europe. Rembrandt painted the portrait of the newborn state.

"Our older England, which we left behind on Frisian shores," is what Lecky names the home of Saskia, Rembrandt's inspiration. In the Lion City of the North, Leeuwarden, in Friesland, most of her girlhood was spent. Many a pretty place in this province, whose speech is nearest of any dialect on the European continent to English, is associated with her name. At St. Anna Parochia she dwelt with her sister Hiskia, and at Franeker, the university town, with sister Antje, consort of the learned Maccovius, and at Bildt was her wedding. Amsterdam was the city of her married life and motherhood.

It was a wise saw, and is often a modern instance, that to marry a Frisian maid to a Dutchman is to link "Frisian faith

to Holland ducats," but Saskia set all the proverbs flying, for to Rembrandt's fame without cash she added revenue as well as beauty. beauty. She was much more than "a Hundred Guilder Print" to him.

Having for two centuries gathered moss-grown fable, the slumbering stone of truth truth is now set rolling. Eekhoff's pamphlet of half a hundred pages concerning "De Vrouw van Rembrandt" opens the archives and lets the documents tell us of "Saskia Ulenburg." From many a tramp in "Free Frisia, among the villages where maids and wives cover their heads with gold, and a night's visitation in the very house of Saskia herself, let me reproduce the story of the rosy maid that married the people's painter.

To Rembrandt inspiration meant woman. No man on earth ever owed more to his female friends than this son of Harmen on the Rhine. His mother and his sisters furnished him his first models. With patience and cheer they helped the boy, so that after working all the daylight hours in his father's brick-house, in Boarder's Alley, opposite the family mill on the Pelican Bastion-even that in which mythology locates his birth-he went for a while, when but sixteen, to learn art in Amsterdam. But homesickness, more probably than anything else, though there was not wanting a grim determination to follow his own ideals and

methods, drove him back to the home of that mother and sister whom he painted so often.

Not until orders for portraits rained on him from the big city did he set his feet thitherward for permanent residence. Perhaps he sailed over the surface of Haarlem Lake, where to-day is empty air, though a score of feet beneath are smiling tulip beds, rose gardens, and delightful homes. In the Amstel city, he took what must have been cheap lodgings and a studio in the western part of the great moated and bastioned municipality. One who goes to-day to the West Church neighborhood, to find Rembrandt's sleeping place, sees the abodes of elegance and wealth; but in the days of the rising artist, the new lots of this recent enlargement were cheap, plentiful and not always built on.

It was in 1606, as Jan Orlers, his contemporary, tells us, that Rembrandt's path of life, which most probably never diverged beyond his country's boundaries, began. Until he met his bride, it had been a straight line among plain folks, whether in the city of professors and theologians, or in the municipality of merchants and aristocrats. But the path of Saskia van Ulenburg, begun in 1612, had touched a wider range of social experience than Rembrandt's, and her life, as woman's so often is, was deeper in emotional experiences. Her father, who had studied law in England, was the friend of William the Silent, and high in honors and office. Besides three brothers, all in professional life, and five sisters, all of whom had mar ried well, Saskia had riches, and these in many senses of the word.

When I visited the home of Saskia in Friesland, a guest in the governor's house where she often was with her father at Leeuwarden, the Frisian burgomaster's daughter, not so very less pretty than Saskia, put on for us that dainty Friesland costume of skirt and bodice, white neckerchief, silver chatelaine bag, and golden helmet with ear rosettes and covering snood of white lace. Though in 1624 this Frisian costume had not reached its perfect evolution, it was in effect the same as to-day. The Frisian is the only provincial costume in which Queen Wilhelmina (the most misrepresented woman on earth, and her husband perhaps the most slan

dered) has appeared in public. Once, she wore on her left forehead the diamondstudded gold "feather," betokening her maidenhood. Anon the same token appeared on her reverse temple, which told the story of wifehood.

No other province, of the eleven in Queen Wilhelmina's kingdom, can claim equal historical honors with Friesland. For ages it was independent of Holland. Until the Zuyder Zee was formed by the sea floods of the thirteenth century, North Holland was part of Friesland. Hence the venerable mother-like dignity of Friesland. Separation by water, lasting seven hundred years, has created differences of speech and customs. Furthermore, since William the Third, king of England and Stadholder of the Netherlands, had no heirs, the male line of the house of Orange-Nassau becoming extinct in him, the Queen traces her line of descent through John William Friso, Stadholder of Friesland, named heir to the house by the Prince of Orange in 1702. So one can see why Queen Wilhelmina in Friesland wears Frisian dress. The modern republic and kingdom are based on the "States of Holland (now two provinces, North and South) and west Friesland."

66

Amsterdam, in her commercial triumph, had left Venice far behind, even while she was nourishing a school of colorists, who amid the canals in the Crescent City were to rival the glories on canvas by the Adriatic lagoon. Living at the home of her cousin, in 1633-the dominie, Jan Cornelius Silvius, whose portrait Rembrandt painted in meditation over an open book-she met perhaps many times the artist from the Rhine." At any rate she sat early and often to him. While painting the brilliant fresh face and golden hair of the preacher's cousin, Rembrandt fell in love with the original of his copy. While he multiplied the latter to dispose of, he won the other, "to have and hold." Saskia, reared among literary and artistic folk, was no stranger to books or pictures. From the moment the vision of his future wife dawned on the painter, he felt a new world of richest influences.

A Frisian of the Frisians, in figure and complexion, she made happy contrast in her physical life and social antecedents to Rembrandt of the Rhine, the miller's son of Leyden. In his sight, she incarnated

the proverb, "Frisian: therefore superfine." With congeniality of taste, there was that difference of temperament which helps to make the ideal marriage. Nor was Saskia a stranger to artists, for Leeuwarden was the home of no fewer than eighteen artists and four art-dealers, whom Eekhoff mentions. Her sister Hendrikje (that word je being the Dutch diminutive, or darling word, and the same as in our Polly, Sally, and Kitty) had taken for her husband an artist named Wybrandt de Geest. In his name, Wybrandt, we see not a family name, but as in the case of Rembrandt, one personal or Christian. Wybrandt had studied in Rome, where he was nicknamed, because of his abilities and graces, which were those of Minerva and of Apelles, "the Frisian eagle."

The guilders began rolling in early to De Geest, for he painted the portraits of prominent and wealthy men, and was thus able to win the hand of the daughter of Rombertus van Ulenburg, the friend of William the Silent. At De Geest's house, Saskia must have had a happy time, with her two little nephews, Julian and Wybrandt, born of the union, both of whom became artists. Her own father having died in 1624, Saskia from her twelfth year made her home henceforth, until her own marriage, with her sisters or her aunts, after one of the latter of whom she was named. She lived for a while at Garyp, a pretty little village eight or ten miles. southeast of Leeuwarden.

Now "the way of a man with a maid," or with any woman who attracts him, in his earlier life, is that in which the desire of possession predominates. If he cares nothing for the feminine reality before him, he does not want her, but if he has the slightest feeling of regard, there is, of necessity, an ambition to possess. This, in an Orient land, explains polygamy. For even Solomon, or the Sultan, who does not know by sight or name a tithe of his women, possibly has not even seen all who fill that vast State establishment called the harem or seraglio, makes a collection of pretty women in flesh and blood very much as the wealthy collect them on canvas to-day. Later in life, for reasons manifold, a man, while honoring women more than ever, and really more in love with the sex, though, it may be, less with

the individual, has comparatively feeble desire for personal possession. He is ready and willing to thank the Creator that there is in the world so much of beauty and charm, and that so much of what makes the world is made by them. Young Rembrandt was most certainly a lover from the first, and he continued one until the church floor laid its earthen mantle and stone lid over his cold treasure. One of Rembrandt's drawings of Saskia shows her with a hat on her head and flowers in her hand. It has under it his handwriting, which tells us that this is his wife on the third day of their betrothal (getrouwd), which may mean either the year before or after wedlock. He painted her again and again during the days of his courtship. Who that knows a lover's pangs and raptures but must sympathize with his terrible disappointment when Saskia was called away north to Franeker, to the bedside of her dying sister Antje, and to live there even after the death of her sister until the following summer. Then she went to spend more time with her sister Hiskia, in the delightful little village of St. Anna Kerk, in the Bildt. When she came back to Amsterdam, Rembrandt painted her with a sprig of rosemary held on her heart, which was the maiden's way of expressing acceptance and betrothal. She was then twenty-one.

We can imagine a Dutch wedding, for the ceremony and festivities in the seventeenth century were not very different from those that we have seen in the nineteenth and twentieth. A marriage was a double-decked affair, both civil and religious. Clerks as well as magistrates and parsons had plenty to do with the business. First came public notice of betrothal, with three publications of the banns, which one can see and hear, in front of the town hall, inside of which also the wedding takes place. There must be witnesses, and, in the case of young people, proofs that parents or guardians give their consent. The "holy" wedlock is further secured through the dominie in the church. The marriage formula still opens with the statement that "Whereas married persons are generally, by reason of sin, subject to many troubles and afflictions" they "may be assured in their hearts of the certain assistance of God,'

riage was civil in the Bildt Town Hall and spiritual at the church at St. Anna, and in the home of her brother Van Loo, the Secretary of the Commune, and his wife, Saskia's sister, the wedding festivities were held June 8, 1634. The journey back was made by way of Franeker, the university town.

Rembrandt worked in several Amsterdam houses, but the domicile to receive perpetual honor is that in which Saskia the beautiful made for him a home and opened the windows of heaven. If ever woman was comrade and inspirer, consecrating herself body and soul to be unto her husband as a helpmeet, that woman was Saskia. Her experiences as an orphan and her training among relatives had made her not only self-reliant, but quick to interpret and supply the needs of an artistic soul like Rembrandt's. Happily for her, that man, if absorbed in art-a wrestling Jacob winning the heaven-born mysteries of light and color, shadow and darkness-was also abstemious, temperate, self-mastered. A lover of regular life and of home, with all its joys in potency and reality, he welcomed the full cradle. Yet, alas, he was not a provider! Not of him the proverb, “He's known on the Amsterdam Bourse." Of money he knew nothing except as something to be spent, and, may we not say, to be wasted? In this uncultivated corner of his teeming soul, stretched the morass of ultimate calamity.

All the world will do honor to Rembrandt's memory on July 16 of this year. His house on the Jew's Broad Street, bought by the city of Amsterdam, fur

nished in the style of the painter's day, is for all time to be kept consecrate to pilgrim-lovers of art. Of two memorial publications, one is a sumptuous edition of his pictures in reproduction, with a true biography, costing what the rich and the libraries can afford to pay. The second, at a price to suit the poor man's purse, will contain those parts of Scripture, in both the Latin Vulgate and the Dutch standard version, which his brush, pen or etching-needle illustrated. A soiree artistique and illumination of the painted and tiled walls of the Rijks Museum, with festivities of all sorts, will make the Dutch and their visitors happy. Nor will his grave in the West Church, nor the more modest house in which he died, fail of tablet in memoriam. Leyden, the university city of his birth and early studies, will also hold a celebration. The house in which he saw the light, for only fairytales tell of his birth in a mill, will receive a memorial bronze.

Happily for Saskia, whose married life lay between "The Anatomy Lesson" and "The Night Watch," she died in 1642, when but thirty years old, without the sight of his sorrow, or her child's, and never knew the gloom of her husband's later years, when the shadows which are in his paintings fell upon himself, and out of which his soul was never lifted. Rembrandt's funeral cost six dollars. We know not, nor does any document tell, how many mourners there were. Yet like the defiant Greek of old, when the arrows of misfortune and the aversion of publie taste darkened the sun of his prosperity, he had fought on in the shade, never for one moment lowering the standard of his ideals. Now, all the world builds his monument. Throned kings and merchant emperors gladly pile guineas or eagles on every square inch of his canvases to make them cross seas and to call them their own. A Rembrandt picture will save an Argonaut's voyage, for it is in itself a fleece of gold.