WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN (1828-1901) ILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN was prominent among those American writers whose lives are spent for the most part away from the country of their birth. His writings partake to a degree of the character of this voluntary exile; being somewhat desultory, concerned with what is of uppermost importance at the moment, whether a search for a rare intaglio in forgotten little streets of Rome, or an insurrection in Crete, whither the author has wandered, or a discussion concerning the identity of an exhumed Greek statue. Yet these seemingly ephemeral magazine articles are of a true literary quality, witnessing to deep and fine perceptions of art and life underneath their surface carelessness. Mr. Stillman began his life as an artist, but was drawn by its natural currents into the career of a writer. Born in Schenectady in 1828, he was graduated from Union College in 1848; beginning soon after the study of painting under F. E. Church. He was for a time a resident artist in New York city, where he established with Mr. Durand the first art journal ever published in this country, the Crayon. After the year 1870 he devoted himself, however, exclusively to literature; yet his art training proved invaluable to him in his office of critic, enabling him to understand and to formulate the instincts of his artistic temperament. From 1861 to 1865 he was United States consul in Rome; holding the same office in Crete from 1865 to 1869. He was therefore a witness of the insurrection in that island, concerning which he wrote the volume entitled The Cretan Insurrection.' For many years he was a regular staff correspondent of the London Times, being stationed first at Athens, and afterward at Rome; and for another long period he was art critic of the New York Evening Post. His environment was ever peculiarly well adapted to his temperament: a fierce, free soul, rejoicing in beauty and battle, he was equally at home in the still art galleries of Florence and Rome, and in scenes of strife. His appreciation of art was subtle and intimate, in the nature of instinct, as was also his appreciation of nature; though in this he was more mystical, more deeply touched with the invisible soul of things. He was one of the first artists who penetrated the Adirondacks, feeling to the uttermost the almost oppressive beauty of the wilderness. His simple, sensuous, and passionate love of art led him directly back to Titian. "In our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of intellectual art; and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach further towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he did, no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away, its unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct,- reveling in art like children in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to science,- all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory, as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls kindling into like glow with faint perception of what had passed from the whole world beside: Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix kept the line of color, now at last utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the greater substance: we kindle with the utilities, and worship the aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our right mind: but we have lost the art of painting; for when Eugène Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood art as Titian understood it, and painted with such art as Veronese's, passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion of a kingly race dies in some alien land." Again he writes of the Venetian painters: "Their lives developed their instincts and their instincts their art;" and of a modern painting: "It is in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Eolian harp, or the greeting of certain sad-voiced children touched by the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone." These passages indicate an unusual degree of sensitiveness to both the spirit and matter of art products, a sensitiveness especially marked in Mr. Stillman's articles on the Old Italian Masters' contributed to the Century Magazine. -- The side of his nature which was congenial with struggle is exhibited in high light in The Cretan Insurrection'; and 'Herzegovina,' a book dealing with the insurrection of 1875-76 in that country. Regarding the Eastern question he writes: "The interests of civilization of Europe entire-demand its [the Mussulman government's] replacement by a new government which shall be amenable to those interests and progress. Having once admitted the necessity for its cessation, we shall more quickly find an accord over the manner of replacing it. It is in attempting to reform it that the danger lies." Besides his various magazine articles on subjects of art or politics, and the two books already mentioned, Mr. Stillman published "Turkish Rule and Turkish Warfare,' 'The Acropolis of Athens,' and 'On the Track of Ulysses.' He died at Surrey, England, July 6, 1901. BILLY AND HANS: A TRUE HISTORY From the Century Magazine: Copyright 1897, by the Century Company S° LONG as the problem of the possession of the capacity of reasoning by the animals of lower rank than man in creation is investigated through those of their species that have been domesticated, and in which the problem of heredity has become complicated with human influence, and the natural instincts with an artificial development of their faculties, no really valuable conclusions can be arrived at. It is only when we take the native gifts of an animal under investigation, at least without the intervention of any trace of heredity and of what under teaching may become a second nature, that we can estimate in scientific exactitude the measure of intelligence of one of the lower animals. The ways of a dog or cat are the result of innumerable generations of ancestors reared in intimate relations with the human master mind. As subjects for investigation into the question of animal character, they are therefore misleading, and the wild creature must be taken. And so far as my observation goes, the squirrel, of all the small animals, shows at once the most character and the most affection; and I believe that the history of two that I have lately lost has a dramatic quality which makes it worth recording. In my favorite summer resort at the lower edge of the Black Forest, the quaint old town of Lauffenburg, a farmer's boy one day brought me a young squirrel for sale. He was a tiny creature, probably not yet weaned: a variation on the ordinary type of the European Sciurus (Sciurus vulgaris), gray instead of the usual red, and with black tail and ears; so that at first, as he contented himself with drinking his milk and sleeping, I was not sure that he was not a dormouse. But examination of the paws, with their delicate anatomy, so marvelously like the human hand in their flexibility and handiness, and the graceful curl of his tail, settled the question of genus; and mindful of my boyhood and early pets, I bought him and named him Billy. From the first moment that he became my companion he gave me his entire confidence, and accepted his domestication without the least indication that he considered it captivity. There is generally a short stage of mute rebellion in wild creatures before they come to accept us entirely as their friends,—a longing for freedom which makes precautions against escape necessary. This never appeared in Billy: he came to me for his bread and milk, and slept in my pocket from the first, and enjoyed being caressed as completely as if he had been born under my roof. No other animal is so clean in its personal habits as the squirrel when in health; and Billy soon left the basket which cradled his infancy, and habitually slept under a fold of my bed-cover, sometimes making his way to my pillow and sleeping by my cheek: and he never knew what a cage was except when traveling, and even then for the most part he slept in my pocket. He went with me to the table d'hôte, and when invited out sat on the edge of the table and ate his bit of bread with a decorum that made him the admiration of all the children in the hotel, so that he accompanied me in all my journeys. He acquired a passion for tea sweet and warm, and to my indulgence of this taste I fear I owe his early loss. He had full liberty to roam in my room: but was my work-table when I was at work; and when his diet became nuts he used to hide them among my books, and then come to hunt them out again, like a child with its toys. I sometimes found my typewriter stopped, and his favorite resort discovered a hazelnut in the works. And when tired of his hideand-seek he would come to the edge and nod to me, to indicate that he wished to go into my pocket or be put down to run about the room; and he soon made a limited language of movements of his head to tell me his few wants,-food, drink, to sleep, or to take a climb on the highest piece of furniture in the room. He was from the beginning devoted to me, and naturally became like a spoiled child. If I gave him an uncracked nut, he rammed it back into my hand to be cracked for him with irresistible persistence. I did as many parents do, and indulged him, to his harm and my own later grief. I could not resist that coaxing nodding, and gave him what he wished,- tea when I had mine, and cracked is nuts, to the injury of his teeth, I was told. In short, I made him as happy as I knew how. Early in my possession of him I cast about if I might find in the neighborhood a companion of the other sex for him; and when finally I heard that in a village just across the Rhine there was a captive squirrel for sale, I sent my son with orders to buy it if a female. It turned out to be a male; but he bought it just the same,- a bright, active, and quite unreconciled prisoner, two months older than Billy, of the orthodox red, just tamed enough to take his food from the hand, but accustomed to be kept with his neck in a collar, to which there was attached a fathom of light dog-chain. He refused with his utmost energy to be handled; and as it was not possible to keep the little creature in the torture of that chain,- for I refuse to keep a caged creature,-I cut the collar and turned him loose in my chamber, where he kept involuntary company with Billy. The imprisonment of the half-tamed but wholly unreconciled animal was perhaps as painful to me as to him, and my first impulse was to turn him out into his native forest to take his chances of life; but I considered that he was already too far compromised with Mother Nature for this to be prudent: for having learned to take his food from a man, the first attack of hunger was sure to drive him to seek it where he had been accustomed to find it; and the probable consequence was being knocked on the head by a village boy, or at best re-consigned to a worse captivity than mine. He had no mother, and he was still little more than a baby; so I decided to keep him and make him as happy as he would let me. His name was Hans. Had I released him as I thought to do, I had saved myself one sorrow, and this history had lost its interest. After a little strangeness, the companionship between the two became as perfect as the utterly diverse nature of their squirrelships would permit. Billy was social and as friendly as a little dog, Hans always a little morose and not over-ready to accept familiarities; Billy always making friendly advances to his companion, which were at first unnoticed, and afterward only submitted to with equanimity. It was as if Billy had accepted the position of the spoiled child of the family, and Hans reluctantly that of an elder brother who is always expected to make way for the pet and baby of the house. Billy was full of fun, and delighted to tease Hans, when he was sleeping, by nibbling at his toes and ears, biting him playfully anywhere he could get at him; and Hans, after a little indignant bark, would bolt away and find another place to sleep in. As they both had the freedom of my large bedroom,-the door of which was carefully guarded, as Hans was always on the lookout for a chance to bolt out into the unknown, they had plenty of room for climbing, and comparative freedom; and after a little time Hans adopted Billy's habit of passing the night in the fold of my bed-rug, and even of nestling with Billy near my head. Billy was from the beginning a bad sleeper, and in his waking moments his standing |