SLOW

I

LOWLY on Morningside Heights rises the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, standing there on a high rock under the Northern sky, above the long wash of the untroubled sea, above the wash of the troubled waves of men.

It has fit neighbors. Across the street to the north looms the many-towered, gray-walled St. Luke's Hospital, cathedral of our ruins, of our sufferings and our dust, near the cathedral of our souls.

Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building with dormer-windows and a crumpled, three-sided roof, the studios of the National Academy of Design, and under that low, brittle skylight youth toils over the shapes and colors of the earth's visible vanishing paradise in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an eternal one.

At the rear of the cathedral, across the roadway, stands a low stone wall. Beyond the wall the earth sinks down a precipice to a green valley bottom far below. Out here is a rugged slope of rock and verdure and forest growth which brings upon the scene an ancient presence, nature-nature, the Elysian Fields of the

art school, the potter's field of the hospital, the harvest field of the church.

Past the foot of this strip of nature, which fronts the dawn and is called Morningside Park, a thoroughfare stretches northward and southward, level and wide and smooth. Over it the two opposite-moving streams of the city's traffic and travel rush headlong. Beyond this thoroughfare an embankment of houses shoves its mass before the eyes, and behind the embankment the city stretches across flats where human beings are as thick as river reeds.

Thus within close reach humanity is here: the cathedral, the hospital, the art school, a field of nature, a broad highway along which, with their hearthfires flickering under their tents of stone, camp life's restless, light-hearted, heavy-hearted Gipsies.

IT was Monday morning and it was nine o'clock. Over at the National Academy of Design, in an upper room, the members of one of the women's portrait classes were assembled, ready to begin work. Easels had been drawn into position; a clear light from the blue sky of the last of April fell through the opened roof upon new canvases fastened to the frames. And it poured down bountifully upon intelligent

young faces. The scene was beautiful, and it was complete except in one particular: the teacher of the class was missing -the teacher and a model.

Minutes passed without his coming, and when at last he did enter, he advanced two or three steps, and paused as though he meant presently to go out again. With his sober smile and quiet good morning he gave his alert listeners the clue to an unusual situation:

"I told the class that to-day we should begin a fresh study. I had not myself decided what this would be. Several models were in reserve, any one of whom could have been used to advantage at this closing stage of the year's course. Then the unexpected happened: on Saturday a stranger came to see me and asked to be engaged. It is this model that is waiting down-stairs now. I have been detained while making some arrangements for her and while explaining to her a few things about which she wished to feel satisfied."

Their thoughts instantly passed to the model: the teacher's manner, his words, invested her with mystery, with fascination. His countenance lighted up wonderfully as he went on:

"She is not a professional; she has never posed. In asking me to engage her she proffered barely the explanation which she seemed to feel due herself. I turn this explanation over to you because she wished, I think, that you also should not misunderstand. It is the fee, then, that is needed, the model's wage; she has felt the common lash of the poor. Plainly here is some one who has stepped down from her place in life, who has traveled far outside her inclinations, to raise a small sum of money. Why she does so is of course her own affair. But the spirit in which she does so becomes our affair, because it becomes a matter of expression. This self-sacrifice, this ordeal which she voluntarily undergoes to gain her end, gives her a look, it shows in her face; and if while she poses, you should be fortunate enough to see this look, along with even finer things, greater things, it will be the aim of your art to catch them all upon your canvases-if you can."

He smiled on them with a kind of fostering challenge to their over-confident impulses and immature art. But he had not yet brought out what most he had in

mind about the mysterious stranger waiting below, and he continued:

"We teachers of art schools in engaging models have to take our human material as we can find it. The best we find is seldom or never what we would prefer. If I, for instance, could have my choice, my students would never be allowed to work from a model who repelled the student or left the student indifferent. No students of mine, if I could have my way, would ever use a model that failed to call forth the finest feelings. Otherwise how can your best emotions have full play in your work; and unless your best emotions enter into your work, what will your work be worth? For if you have never before understood the truth, try to realize it now that you will succeed in painting only through the best that is in you; just as only the best in you will ever carry you triumphantly to the end of any practical human road that is worth the travel, just as you will reach all life's best goals only by your best. But in painting remember that the best is never in the eye, for the eye can only perceive, the eye can only direct; and the best is never in the hand, for the hand can only measure, the hand can only move. In painting the best comes from emotion. You may lack eyes and be none the poorer in character; you may lack hands and be none the poorer in character; but whenever in life you lack any great emotion, you are the poorer in everything. And so in painting you can fail after the eye has gained all necessary knowledge, you can fail after your hand has received all necessary training, either because nature has denied you the foundations of great feeling, or because, having these foundations, you have failed to make them the foundations of your work.

"But among a hundred models there might not be one such. Actually in the world, among the thousands of people we meet, how few stir in us our best, force us to our best! It is the rarest experience of our lifetimes that we meet a man or a woman who literally drives us to the realization of what we really are and can really do. What we all most need for our careers is one who can liberate within us that lifelong prisoner whose doom it is to remain a captive until some one else sets it free-our best. For we can never

set our best free by our own hands; that must always be done by another."

They were listening to him with a startled first-hand recognition of their inmost selves. He was now ready to drive home his point about the waiting stranger:

"I am going to introduce to you, then, a model who beyond all the others you have worked with will liberate in you your finer selves. It is a rare opportunity. Do not thank me. I did not find her. Life's storms have driven her violently across the landscape of the world against the walls of the art school; we must see to it at least that she be not bruised while it remains her shelter, her refuge. Who she is, what her life has been, where she comes from, how she happens to arrive here- these are privacies into which of course we do not intrude. Immediately behind herself she drops a curtain of silence which obliterates every such sign of her past. But there are other signs of that past which she cannot hide, and which it is our privilege, our duty, the aim of our art, to read. They are writ

ten on her face, on her bearing, on her hands; they are written all over her-the bruises of life's rudenesses, the lingering shadows of former dark days, the pride and the wounded pride, the stripped fortunes, the unconquerable will, a spirit whose wings are meant for the upper air, but which are tied, and beat the dust. All these are sublime things to paint in any human being; they are the footprints of destiny on our faces. The greatest masters of the brush that the world has ever known could not have asked for anything greater. When you behold her, perhaps some of you may think of certain brief, but eternal, words of Pascal: 'Man is a reed that bends, but does not break.' Such is your model, then, a face with a great look; the fighting face of a woman at peace. For out upon the darkened battle-field of this woman's face shines one serene sun, and that sun brings out upon it its marvelous human radiance, its supreme expression: it is the love of the mother. Your model has the beauty of motherhood, the sacredness of motherhood, the glory of motherhood."

der forces came forth, eager to serve, to obey. He added a few particulars:

"For a while after she is posed you will no doubt see many different expressions pass rapidly over her face. This will be a new and painful experience to which she will not be able to adapt herself at once. She will be uncomfortable, she will be awkward, she will be embarrassed, she will be without her full value. But I think from what I have discovered that she will soon grow oblivious to her surroundings. They will not overwhelm her; she will overwhelm them. She will soon forget you and me and the studio; the one ruling passion of her life will sweep back over her; and then out upon her features will come again that marvelous look which has almost remodeled them to itself alone." He added, "I will go for her."

As he turned to leave, he glanced at some screens placed at that end of the room; behind these the models made their preparations to pose.

"I have arranged," he said significantly, "that she leave her things down-stairs."

It seemed long before they heard him on the way back. He came slowly, as though concerned not to hurry his model, as though to shield her from the disrespect of urgency. Even the natural noise of his feet on the bare hallway was restrained. They listened for the sounds of her footsteps. In the tense silence of the studio a pin-drop might have been noticeable, a breath would have been audible; but they could not hear her footsteps. He might have been followed by a spirit. Those feet of hers must be very light feet, very quiet feet.

He entered and advanced a few paces, and turned as though to make way for some one of far more importance than himself; and there walked forward and stopped at a delicate distance from them all a woman, bareheaded, ungloved, slender, straight, of middle height, and in life's middle years-Rachel Truesdale.

She did not look at him or at them; she did not look at anything. It was not her rôle to notice. She merely waited, perfectly composed, to be told what to do. Her actual life did not enter into the scene at all; she was there solely as having been hired for a work.

One privilege she had exercised unsparingly-not to offer herself for this em