was an
artist by profession, and in the course of a symposium or two Tristrem
discovered that he was a very cultivated fellow besides. He seemed to be
well on in the thirties, and it was evident that there were few quarters
of the globe with which he was not familiar. He was enthusiastic on the
subject of French literature, but the manufactures of the pupils of the
Beaux Arts he professed to abominate.

"The last time I was at the Salon," he said, one evening, "there were in
those interminable halls over three thousand pictures. Of these, there
were barely fifty worth looking at. The others were interesting as
colored lithographs on a dead wall. There was a Manet or two, a Moreau,
and a dozen or more excellent landscapes, but the rest represented the
apotheosis of mediocrity. The pictures which Gerome, Cabanel,
Bouguereau, and the acolytes of those pastry-cooks exposed were stupid
and sterile as church doors. What is art, after all, if it be not an
imitation of nature? To my thinking, the greater the illusion, the
nearer does the counterfeit approach the model. And look at the nymphs
and dryads which those hair-dressers present. In the first place, nymphs
and dryads are as overdone as the assumption of Virgins and the loves of
Leda. Besides they were not modern, but even if they were, fancy a girl
who lives in the open air in her birthday costume, and who, exposed to
the sun, to say nothing of the wind, still preserves the pink and white
skin of a baby--and a skin, mind you, that looks as though it had been
polished and pinched by a masseur; however, place a dozen of them
lolling in conventional attitudes in a glade, or represent them bathing
in a pond, and although the sun shines on them through the foliage, be
careful not to get so much as the criss-cross of a shadow on their
bodies, smear the whole thing with cold cream, label one 'Arcadia,' and
the other 'Nymphs surprised,' and you have what they call in France the
_faire distingue_."

There was nothing particularly new in what Mr. Yorke had to say, and if,
like the majority of men whose thoughts run in a particular channel, he
was apt to be dogmatic in his views, he yet possessed that saving
quality, which consists in treating the subject in hand not as were it a
matter of life and death, but rather as one which is as unimportant as
the gout of a distant relative. And it was in the companionship of this
gentleman, and that of the young lady alluded to, that Trist