sweetness of those uncertain "First Steps," and the glorious spirit of paternity expressed in the affectionate outstretched arms of the father, or to incline the head with those two fine figures in "The Angelus," is to come at one mighty sweep into perfect sympathy with these patient bearers of life's burdens.

Meunier in sculpture did for the industrial workers what Millet in painting did for the peasant. Labor had a strange and overpowering fascination for Meunier, and he used to sit for hours in wonder and admiration, watching the turmoil of the docks in Antwerp. In the black country he would lose himself in a mass of miners rushing home from their work or watch at night superb figures before the flaring furnaces. In Meunier's sketches one is given some idea of how black and sinister he conceived modern industry to be, and at times his work is pervaded with a pathos that almost unnerves one; but the feeling is rarely dominant. He sometimes saw among the workers of Belgium a spent toiler, but none the less superb. I know of nothing in sculpture that seems to me more god-like than the head which he calls "Antwerp," symbolizing Labor; for that is what Antwerp meant to him. It is quiet, yet it breathes of action. There is not that refinement of the Greek which shows softness and weakness; there is no superfluous flesh. It is the face of a conqueror obeying a cosmic instinct; the symbol of the indomitable spirit of Labor which creates from the raw materials of hill and valley the necessary products of civilized life. Most of Meunier's work was devoted to portraits of peasants, miners, puddlers, glass workers, dockers, and laborers.*

* A striking tribute has recently been paid Meunier by the dockers of Genoa, who have purchased his "Le Débardeur" from their union funds.

It was the faithful effort to picture the lives of the men, women, and children of toil. The best examples of his art are in Brussels, and nowhere could they be more appropriately found or their teaching be more necessary. Belgium is the workshop of Europe, and it is well to have there these figures typifying Labor the Conqueror, a prophecy of what shall one day arrive.

Grigoróvitch and Turguéneff did much to acquaint the intellectuals of Russia with peasant life, and Gorky, during the last ten years, has done remarkable work in the same direction. Gorky is a rebel; not as many writers are, in the library only. He is an active, conspiring revolutionist; in the open when possible, underground when necessary. When you have once seen Gorky, you understand the source of his power. His eyes they make one think of high-power searchlights - have a force of vision which penetrates into the inner meaning of things. Life cannot deceive Gorky, and if one reads "Malva," "Tchelkache," the "Ex-men," or "Twenty-six and One," - those searching short stories in which Gorky is at his best,—and thinks them overdrawn, he does not know the life of the abyss. Gorky's tramps and outcasts are never completely lost or vanquished. They too are idealists and rebels, as are most Russians of the working-class. Although too broken in body to be effective, there is hardly one whose spirit is unworthy of our admiration. His pictures of lodginghouse and slum, of factory and tenement, are no less wonderful than those appealing landscapes which so often form the background in his masterly pictures of Russian life. In his plays and novels even the most miserable of his characters have the instincts of man and the fire of rebellion. As with Meunier,

one always feels when reading Gorky that however adverse the conditions, and however terrible the oppression, the spirit of man is unconquerable.

It is to Giovanni Verga that we must go to find pictures of Italian life comparable to those that Gorky has drawn of Russian life. In "The House by the Medlar Tree" we are shown the lowest misery, that of a Sicilian village. With powerful realism and infinite detail Verga portrays the peasants, the fisher folk, the toilers crushed under their burdens, and the vanquished wrecks; and above these unfortunates, the political, social, and religious parasites that prey upon ignorance and helplessness. In "Master Don Gesualdo" he pictures the middle-class provincial; in "The Duchess of Leyra," the silly vanities of the upper class; in a later book, the political corruption and petty intrigue so prevalent in Italian life; and at last he personifies in "The Man of Lusso" all the social and political vices that are crushing the Italian people. He is powerful, but his lines are often hard and his realism without grace. In some respects he is more like Zola than Gorky, for his sordid, ghastly pictures of misery are too often unaccompanied with that sympathy which one notes in the work of all Russians.

Matilde Serao and Ada Negri are two remarkable Italian women, one a novelist, the other a poet, both expressing the same revolt and picturing, each in her own effective way, the evils of modern society. Matilde Serao's "Il Ventre di Napoli," say the authors of "Italy To-day," is "a passionate appeal, straight from a woman's heart, to the rulers of Italy, pleading that no mere 'gutting' of Naples by a few new streets can avail aught in healing the terrible social and economic miseries