N an age of book-making it is a delight to come upon a volume like this, which is a child of enthusiasm. The difference between the chromo and the painting, or the orchestrion and the living orchestra, is hardly greater or more apparent than the difference between a book which has been made to order and one which has grown out of the love of the author, and is pervaded by the warmth and illuminated by the glow of his ardor. Love cannot be successfully simulated; no rhetorical device, no literary skill, can impart the equivalent of life. And life, though it is not genius, is an essential element of genius. Dr. Van Dyke is an artist without an artist's technique; a poet who writes in form of prose. "The whole function of the artist in the world," says Mr. Ruskin, "is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions

THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART. A Study of Interpretation.

which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded or fade from the book of record." If this is a true definition, then Dr. Van Dyke is a true artist, albeit he interprets by the pen, not by the brush. To the Bible student he is known by his volume on the Psalms, to the student of English literature by his study of Tennyson; the same poetic instinct has made him a student of sacred art; the same chastened imagination has fitted him to be an art interpreter.

The story of the Christ-child in the four Gospels is very brief and very simple. The Annunciation, the Manger, the Wondering Shepherds, the Presentation in the Temple, the Adoring Magi, the Flight into Egypt, the Return to Galilee, the Visit to the Rabbis, these incidents comprise the whole child-life, and these incidents are narrated with a severe and impressive simplicity which is the despair of uninspired writers. But for this very reason, this epoch of the Christ-life has been a favorite theme for art and song and story. Imagination unfettered has found in this simplicity of Gospel narrative its opportunity.

& Brothers, New York.

framed in the narrative with endless orna

46

which suggests conquering and to conquer;" the Christ-child, pale, solemn, wideeyed, a child of divine sorrow and hope, his serious face suggestive of the future Passion week, and his outstretched arms and fore-looking eyes suggesting the inspired bearer of a great Gospel. Sometimes, perhaps often, in medieval art, the fancy is meretricious, the imagination false, the symbolism unreal, the suggestions infelicitous, not to say worse; as in Andrea del Sarto's picture of the Annunciation, with a palace in the background, and David peering over the balcony at Bathsheba taking her bath on the porch below. The more valuable is it to have such a guide as Dr. Van Dyke, not only to go before us and examine the art treasures of Europe, finding unexpected beauties in strange, out-of-the-way places, not only to select from the superabundant treasures of art

those most worthy of our seeing, but to interpret these interpreters of the Christ-child to us, and make their meaning clear; for to understand art one must needs be something of an artist himself, and many a picture which is at first unmeaning grows eloquent when its significance is pointed out by such an interpreter as Dr. Van Dyke. The true story of the Christ-child is the story of that life of motherhood and childhood which the Gospel narrative has inspired, and we do not truly seize the significance of the Christ-child's life until we understand the reverence and love for both motherhood and childhood of which the sacred art of eighteen centuries is an expression. The interpretation of this life is the service which Dr. Van Dyke, in his "Christ-Child in Art," has rendered the American church and the American home; it is a noble service which he has undertaken, and it has been nobly rendered.

"As we read we inhale an odor from the leaves as if flowers from the garden of childhood had been pressed

of association we stand among them where they grew."

HE Reviewer has just finished reading the book for the second time.

THE

It was

a dangerous precedent, but it has induced a golden humour in which it would be impossible to dismiss the subject by copying

THE ONE I KNEW THE BEST OF ALL-A Memory of the Mind of a Child. By Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett. With Illustrations by R. B. Birch. 12mo, $2.00. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.