(1) Is it certain that in the department of the Meurthe it has been customary to keep up a system of information and plotting with the enemies of France with a view of favouring the success of their arms on Republican territory?

(2) Is Charlotte-Jeanne Rutant convicted of having taken part in this understanding, in having kept up a correspondence with the enemies of the Republic?

The reply consists of a short sentence, signed Dobsent: The jury declares in the affirmative on the above questions, the 5th of October 1793.'

Sentence was immediately passed. What it was and how it was executed the official report of the officer Tirrart leaves us, alas, in no possible doubt:

I, Tirrart, the usher of the Criminal Tribunal, was present in the Court of Justice of said Tribunal to witness the execution of the sentence passed by the Tribunal yesterday, the 5th, against the prisoner Charlotte-Jeanne Rutant that condemned her to death, whereupon we delivered her to the executioner of capital sentences and to the gendarmerie, who led her to the Place de la Révolution' of this city, where on a scaffold erected in the said 'place,' the said CharlotteJeanne de Rutant in our presence suffered the penalty of death.

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TIRRART (Signed).

This was entered under the heading Official report on execution of death sentence-1793, 2o year of the République.'

In the original French many curious mistakes are to be noticed. There is no month given and Charlotte-Jeanne is mentioned twice over as 'he.' The guillotine and its agents were as yet only accustomed to masculine victims. Charlotte was the fifth woman condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal, the second since Charlotte Corday and the immediate predecessor of Marie-Antoinette, who followed her to the scaffold after an interval of ten days, as though Fouquier-Tinville wished to strengthen his hand with practice before striking his greatest victim.

The years have passed away. The generation that remembered the Revolution no longer exists, old memories, old traditions, all have faded, and now in her beloved Saulxures only a few very old people recall the stories they have heard of 'Mademoiselle Charlotte,' and tell with reverence the tales of the goodness and bravery of the family of the ci-devant lords of the soil. For now, alas, strangers live at the old château and the family of de Rutant is extinct. But Charlotte deserves to be not quite forgotten, at least in her native land; so long as there are any left who can feel pity for such tragic destinies or admiration for the high courage that could enable a mere girl to meet a shameful death with as much bravery as any of the heroes of Lorraine who fell facing the foe on the field of battle-and whose fame will live in prose and verse for ever.

GWENDOLINE BELLEW.

THE AMATEUR ARTIST

THEY viewed the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures with all the eagerness of real taste. A lecture on the picturesque followed, and he talked of foregrounds, distances and second distances, side screens and perspectives.'

Mr. Tilney was the 'he,' and he was talking to Catherine Morland. How intelligent and interesting their conversation sounds! Does the young lady of to-day hear the like observations from her partners? Does she even know the exact meaning of side screens' and 'second distances herself?

The period of Mr. Tilney is more than a hundred years ago, but it is bridged over for us; we can still meet with those who were the young ladies of the sixties and fifties, and who retained in some measure the Tilney tradition. We can still see their watercolour sketches and, by looking at these products of the Victorian era, we become more conscious of the decay of amateur art in

our own.

It is evident that in Mr. Tilney's eyes the choice of a suitable subject and the making of a picture, not a study, were the principal points of importance to the artist. This tradition continued for another fifty years or so; and if the amateurs of the later date did not set themselves to work with quite the same cold-blooded paraphernalia of second distances, side screens, and perspectives, still they looked for a subject that would make a picture. Ruins had an almost fatal attraction for them; rustic bridges, groups of forest trees with glimpses of historic mansions, rocky dells (happily not quite so frequent), lakes romantically surrounded by hills-such were the subjects that appealed to them. The chosen subjects of to-day are only too well known; the wide stretch of sea and sand, the solitary haystack, the marshland with the horizon lying very high up, and the bit of road leading from nowhere to

nowhere.

From a recent study of an amateur exhibition I find that the attitude towards the picture which has a definitely composed subject

is not only one of distaste but of strong moral condemnation, because a definitely composed subject is not a humble and reverent study of nature. But to my mind the old-fashioned amateur water-colour sketches showed in some respects a more genuine observation of nature than do those of the present day. In spite of their disregard of tone, these early water colours breathe a real sense of beauty, a feeling not only for a pleasing composition, but for harmonious colouring and delicate outline.

Harmonious! delicate! Did ever anyone hear such words at a Government school of art? Strong' and 'bold' were the only complimentary adjectives I ever heard applied, and the more muddy the colour and undefined the form, the 'stronger' the picture appeared to become.

Sixty years ago, when the amateur studied art, she began by drawing outlines; later, these outlines were shaded in pencil; then followed studies in sepia; and finally she arrived at water-colour painting. Oils were unsuitable for ladies; there was something professional, almost indecorous, about them. I cannot but feel that the early Victorians showed some of their usual good sense in this opinion.

In the Tilney period there was, I suppose, a traditional standard of elegance and taste; there was a conventional scheme of colouring which the amateur would naturally make use of; no violent colouring was seemly in water colours. Sixty years later you still painted the summer foliage in raw sienna and the grass in yellow ochre, feeling, I believe, as strong a conviction of the accuracy of your representation of nature, as do the students of our day with their unmitigated greens-a conviction, perhaps, not altogether unjustifiable.

We may say roughly that the difference between the old tradition of amateur art and our own is that the past generation aimed at representing beauty, we at representing truth. Needless to say we have none of us attained our ideal, but I think that the ideal they set before themselves was the more suitable one. They very frequently produced something that was pretty. I never can understand why people object to having their pictures called pretty, by which I mean beautiful in a rather limited and conventional sense. It is something definite to have attained even to prettiness, and not many of us get much further. We feel that after thirty years of art schools there should be many thousands of women who know and like what is pretty, or who, at any rate, know and dislike what is flagrantly hideous. How is it, then, that motor caps, the modern artistic photographs, electric light, the fancy department at the Army and Navy Stores (to name at random a few abuses), are still amongst our most popular institutions? It seems as if our art education had done but little to form taste. Have we had a really

artistic and beautiful style of dress since the death of the last crinoline, or a really distinguished style of doing the hair since the days of the chignon? Have we made any protest against the growth of advertisements or the demolition of the remnants of beauty in the suburbs ?

I have spoken in this paper of the student as 'she,' because the amateur artist is generally a woman, or perhaps, one might put it, because the women artists are generally amateurs. I have occasionally tried to find out what becomes of the innumerable figures in long pinafores that idle away their time so gaily for a few years in the schools of art. Do they generally become professional artists? No the greater number of them drift into philanthropy, matrimony, or inactivity. Therefore, in considering the art education given to women, we must think of it generally as given to amateurs, and the amateur's art education is to my mind fully as important as the professional's.

There is a tendency nowadays to look down on amateurs and to drive anyone with a little talent into the ranks of unsuccessful professionals. We can imagine that if Jane Eyre had been showing her portfolio, with its curious collection of corpses, cormorants, and heads inclined on icebergs, in the year 1909, Mr. Rochester would have said, 'Oh, but you ought to take it up professionally; you ought to go and study at a school of art,' and we may guess that once at the school of art there would have been no more curious things to show; the masters would have been too puzzled. It took, indeed, much less to puzzle them. The subjects for the Sketch-Club had in my time to be almost exclusively taken from the Old Testament, out of consideration for their limitations. On one occasion Sintram was chosen; but the criticism was so ambiguous that it was found necessary to return to Abraham and Isaac.

The amateur should learn from her artistic education to find pleasure in natural beauty, in good pictures, and in architecture; she should, in fact, try and recover and transmit to her descendants the elegant tastes of Mr. Tilney. Does the education she receives at the schools of art help her to do this?

The student on first arriving has probably in her head the oldfashioned notion of an outline to be coloured, but this is instantly dispelled; for in as far as the schools have any ruling principle it is that there are no lines anywhere, but only different masses of tone. She is plunged into difficulties of light and shade before her eye has had any training in proportion, and for months she is floundering about trying to acquire two terribly difficult ideas at the same time. Now, as most women are without a natural sense of form, she will probably emerge with some understanding of tone, and none whatever of drawing. I was confronted at the beginning of my studies with

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a colossal mouth. Could anything be more unsuitable for the beginner than an object swelled beyond all proportion and taken out from its proper surroundings? After some studies in charcoal of chunks of the human frame, I was set to do charcoal heads from the antique. After all too few of these I was provided with stumps, and then came hours and hours and days and days of work upon one head, of finishing when one had scarcely knowledge enough to begin; and oh! how weary were the five hours at the studio for those whose irrepressible consciences forced them to work. The next stage was to stump the heads of models; the model came for a month, and we stumped his head for sixty hours. Then came drawing from the fulllength model. Here all would have been interesting had we been allowed to vary the poses, but the models generally refused to do anything but sit classically or stand heroically with a pointer in the hand, and it was considered rather inhumane to ask them even for a back view. The final stage of the curriculum was of course oil painting from life. There was no attempt at differentiation of the pupils ; we were all regarded in the light of embryo portrait painters. But,' said the amateur of fifty years ago—now an old lady with an interest in art-do you want to paint portraits?' 'No,' said I; 'I want to do landscapes.' 'But why don't they teach you that? When I was young we had a master who took us out to paint from

nature.'

It is true that one summer we did have some sketching lessons once a week, but they were not considered an important part of our art training, and we had the same harassed master with too many pupils and three minutes to bestow on each. At the first lesson he selected my subject for me, after which I was considered to have received sufficient instruction on this most important point, and henceforth chose for myself, one lank fir-tree emerging from a shrubbery, a sand-pit covered with ragwort, and the like. told to put a few dots and dashes to place my sketch,' and then to fill my brush chock-full of colour and water, and put in what I saw straight away.' But it needs a very skilful water colourist to manipulate a large brush slopping over with wet paint; even if I had had an outline to go by, I should have streamed about all over it. As it was, I put in a general impression, which even to my inexperienced eye was quite unlike what I saw, covered up my paper somehow, and had finished.

Of course the idea of putting in' your picture irrevocably right at the first moment is the proper ambition of every painter, but it is quite impossible for the beginner to attempt it, and attempting the impossible makes her perforce content with a lower standard than is necessary.

We remember in Miss Yonge's novels the heroine takes up her