WHATEVER may be said in extenuation of magazine editors, it must be admitted that they confuse the calendar. They keep a private Christmas in midsummer, and Easter by the first snowfall. If the Atlantic's editor wishes to say Happy New Year to the patrons of the magazine, he is forced to write in November the words which he would prefer to speak, two months later, at some real banquet of the Atlantic's readers. A year ago, the Toastmaster remembers; he was writing his New Year's greeting in a sunny window-seat in Florence. Two cabmen, lazily exchanging Tuscan epithets on the square beneath the window, distracted his attention as he meditated upon the Atlantic's coming semi-centennial and composed with due piety a few paragraphs about Turning the Old Leaves. And he said to himself, "This is poor writing, but that may be the cabmen's fault. At worst, it gives a good title for another January greeting, after the anniversary is over. That shall be called Turning the New Leaves."

And so, in fulfillment of this year-old editorial engagement, Turning the New Leaves it shall be. After all the kindly wishes which the Atlantic's semi-centennial has brought, and with the abundant space which the anniversary number devoted to the founders, no one will be likely to think that the magazine is unmindful of its past, or ungrateful for the tributes to its ancient achievements. We have been having a sort of family reunion, when the talk has turned naturally upon old scenes, half-forgotten incidents, and vanished personages; things dear to the family circle, although elsewhere unintelligible. But the reunion is VOL. 101 - NO. 1

over now. The old leaves have all been turned, gently, humorously, or with regret. The Atlantic for 1908 is waiting to be read, and it will be read because its subscribers enjoy what it contains to-day, and not because Ralph Waldo Emerson was a contributor to the first number.

Men and women who are alive and writing- not dead and famous - make the Atlantic what it is. They write as well as their fathers did. Excluding the first half-dozen names of the older generation, as representing heights of poetry and imaginative prose unreached to-day, the children write even better than their fathers, and they have a greater variety of interesting things to say. No one can

have read the four articles in the November number, comparing 1857 and 1907 as regards the state of politics, literature, art, and science, without becoming freshly aware that we are living in a world of new conditions. Some things dear to Atlantic readers of the old sort have disappeared forever, but the life of America which it is the object of this magazine to reflect and to interpret so various, vigorous, and right-minded as it is this very morning. No one need dwell among the tombs.

was never

A magazine cannot endeavor to offer the hospitality of its pages to writers representing these new varieties of training, conviction, and experience, without wounding some sensibilities. The Toastmaster gives the floor to many kinds of speakers. Sometimes, in truth, he gets anxious during their remarks and looks at his watch. Occasionally the audience, in turn, looks anxious, and possibly some one gets up and goes out. This has hap

pened during 1907, as it will doubtless continue to happen, but the fact that there have been two new subscribers for every old one lost does not lessen the Toastmaster's regret that tolerance for the other parish is still a plant of imperfect flowering.

For the Atlantic is not a club made up of an esoteric circle of people who use its pages for the exchange of congenial ideas. The Toastmaster once tried to picture it as a pension, where there were violets by each plate, indeed, as if it were a private dinner party, but where both Caterer and boarders were in reality quite aware that there were other pensions near by, clamorous for patronage. In his gloomier moments, the Toastmaster's task appears to him as being not so much that of the Caterer and Announcer of a feast, as that of an Umpire, calling balls and strikes to the perfect satisfaction of neither the players, the spectators, nor himself. But the real umpire has printed rules for his guidance, and police protection after the game. The editor has neither. He is rather, let us say, a Picture Dealer, with certain private standards of taste in the back of his head, perhaps, but obliged to buy only such canvases as his capital will warrant, and to hang them in such a fashion as may reasonably be expected to attract purchasers, all other canvases being "unavailable" for him. Yet one must remember that some of these harassed dealers the joke of artists, and compelled to buy only what they could sell again - have

nevertheless managed to form and to maintain a sound artistic taste in a whole community.

After all, the plain "$4.00 a year" printed upon the Atlantic's cover is as good an image and symbol of editorial policy as could be wished. Subscribing to a magazine, like buying a picture, is a business transaction. Sentiment may have a share in it, but at bottom it is a question of getting and giving the worth of the money. Four dollars is a good round sum, - if one has to go out and earn it, as most of the Atlantic's subscribers do. The notion that they belong to the leisure class is an amusing fiction, which dies hard. The great majority of them and all of the Cheerful Readers, apparently have to work for their four dollars, and they expect, month by month, a fair return upon their investment. If they do not receive it, they will surely begin to speculate with some of the Atlantic's youthful and comely rivals, in spite of their respect for Fiftieth Anniversaries and for the reputation of distinguished dead contributors. And the Atlantic, preferring these clear-headed subscribers to any others, means to give them their money's worth. The Toastmaster may be prejudiced, · even umpires and picture dealers have been known to be, but he cannot help thinking that the writers engaged for 1908 are good enough company for the best authors and readers who ever sat around the Atlantic's table. Turn the new leaves, and see.

B. P.

I

I

PARIS TO POITIERS

SPRING again, and the long white road unrolling itself southward from Paris. How could one resist the call?

We answered it on the blandest of late March mornings, all April in the air, and the Seine fringing itself with a mist of yellowish willows as we rose over it, climbing the hill to Ville d'Avray. Spring comes soberly, inaudibly as it were, in these temperate European lands, where the grass holds its green all winter, and the foliage of ivy, laurel, holly, and countless other evergreen shrubs, links the lifeless to the living months. But the mere act of climbing that southern road above the Seine meadows seemed as definite as the turning of a leaf-the passing from a black-and-white page to one illuminated. And every day now would turn a brighter page for us.

Goethe has a charming verse, descriptive, it is supposed, of his first meeting with Christiane Vulpius: "Aimlessly I strayed through the wood, having it in my mind to seek nothing."

Such, precisely, was our state of mind on that first day's run. We were simply pushing south toward the Berry, through a more or less familiar country, and the real journey was to begin for us on the morrow, with the run from Châteauroux to Poitiers. But we reckoned without our France! It is easy enough, glancing down the long page of the Guide Continental, to slip by such names as Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres and Valençay, in one's dash for the objective point; but there is no slipping by them in the motor, they

lurk in one's path, throwing out great loops of persuasion, arresting one's flight, complicating one's impressions, oppressing, bewildering one with the renewed, half-forgotten sense of the hoarded richness of France.

Versailles first, unfolding the pillared expanse of its north façade to vast empty perspectives of radiating avenues; then Rambouillet, low in a damp little park, with statues along green canals, and a look, this moist March weather, of being somewhat below sea-level; then Maintenon, its rich red-purple walls and delicate stone ornament reflected in the moat dividing it from the village street. Both Rambouillet and Maintenon are characteristically French in their way of keeping company with their villages. Rambouillet, indeed, is slightly screened by a tall gate, a wall and trees; but Maintenon's warm red turrets look across the moat, straight into the windows of the opposite houses, with the simple familiarity of a time when class distinctions were too fixed to need emphasizing.

Our third château, Valençay - which, for comparison's sake, one may couple with the others, though it lies far south of Blois - Valençay bears itself with greater aloofness, bidding the town "keep its distance" down the hill on which the great house lifts its heavy angle-towers and flattened domes. A huge cliff-like wall, enclosing the whole southern flank of the hill, supports the terraced gardens before the château, which to the north is divided from the road by a vast cour d'honneur with a monumental grille and gateway. The impression is grander yet less noble.

But France is never long content to

3

repeat her effects; and between Maintenon and Valençay she puts Chartres and Blois. Ah, these grey old cathedral towns with their narrow clean streets widening to a central place at Chartres a beautiful oval, like the market-place in an eighteenth-century print with their clipped lime-walks, high garden-walls, Balzacian gables looking out on sunless lanes under the flanks of the granite giant! Save in the church itself, how frugally all the effects are produced with how sober a use of greys and blacks, and pale high lights, as in some Van der Meer interior; yet how intense a suggestion of thrifty compact traditional life one gets from the low house-fronts, the barred gates, the glimpses of clean bare courts, the calm yet quick faces in the doorways! From these faces again one gets the same impression of remarkable effects produced by the discreetest means. French physiognomy if not vividly beautiful is vividly intelligent; but the long practice of manners has so veiled its keenness with refinement as to produce a blending of vivacity and good temper nowhere else to be matched. And in looking at it one feels once more, as one so often feels in trying to estimate French architecture or the French landscape, how much of her total effect France achieves by elimination. If marked beauty be absent from the French face, how much more is marked dullness, marked brutality, the lumpishness of the clumsilymade and the unfinished! As a mere piece of workmanship, of finish, the French provincial face the peasant's face, even- often has the same kind of interest as a work of art.

66

The

One gets, after repeated visits to the 'show' towns of France, to feel these minor characteristics, the incidental graces of the foreground, almost to the exclusion of the great official spectacle in the centre of the picture; so that while the first image of Bourges or Chartres is that of a cathedral surrounded by a blur, later memories of the same places present a vividly individual town, with

doorways, street-corners, faces intensely remembered, and in the centre a great cloudy Gothic splendour.

At Chartres the cloudy splendour is shot through with such effulgence of colour that its vision, evoked by memory, seems to beat with a fiery life of its own, as though red blood ran in its stone veins. It is this suffusion of heat and radiance that chiefly, to the untechnical, distinguishes it from the other great Gothic interiors. In all the rest, colour, if it exists at all, burns in scattered unquiet patches, between wastes of shadowy grey stone and the wan pallor of later painted glass; but at Chartres those quivering waves of unearthly red and blue flow into and repeat each other in rivers of light, from their source in the great western rose, down the length of the vast aisles and clerestory, till they are gathered up at last into the mystical heart of the apse.

A short afternoon's run carried us through dullish country from Chartres to Blois, which we reached at the fortunate hour when sunset burnishes the great curves of the Loire and lays a plumcoloured bloom on the slate roofs overlapping, scale-like, the slope below the castle. There are few finer roof-views than this from the wall at Blois: the blue sweep of gables and ridge-lines billowing up here and there into a church tower with its clocheton mailed in slate, or breaking to let through the glimpse of a carved façade, or the blossoming depths of a hanging garden; but perhaps only the eye subdued to tin house-tops and iron chimney-pots can feel the full poetry of old roofs.

Coming back to the Berry six weeks earlier than on our last year's visit, we saw how much its wide landscape needs the relief and modelling given by the varied foliage of May. Between bare woods and scarcely-budded hedges the great meadows looked bleak and monotonous; and only the village gardens hung out a visible promise of spring. But in the sheltered enclosure at Nohant, spring seemed much nearer; at hand already in