iment he
might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the
latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story declined
appreciably, year by year, falling away from his own standard; haunted
to the point of obsession by visions of mournful female figures,
generally seated, wrapped in gloom. It seems strange," this critic
continues, "that so active a mind should dream of nothing but brooding,
sinister souls, of bodies bowed in grief, or tense with rage. Never
once, apparently, did there come to him a vision of buoyancy and grace;
of a beauty that one could love; of good cheer and joy of very living;
always these unwholesome creatures born of that belated Byronic
romanticism."

This criticism, while it has as little appreciation of Mr. Story's
exquisite culture and of the taste and refinement of his art as the
general rush of the motor car and telephonic conversational life of the
first decade of the twentieth century has of the thoughtful, the poetic,
the leisurely atmosphere of Mr. Story's time, is yet not without a keen
flashlight of truth. Painting had its reactionary crisis from the
pre-Raphaelite ideals and the _intransigeants_ have had their own
conflicts in which they survived, or disappeared, according to the
degree of artistic vitality within. Sculpture and literature must also
meet the series of tests to which the onward progress of life persists
in subjecting them, and those who are submerged and perish can only
encourage the survivors as did the Greeks, as sung by Theocritus:--

"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale."

"As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes
more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary
fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment;
but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding
significance of his work--or the lack of it--as to whether this fame is
perpetuated. That of Mr. Story does not hold within itself all the
qualities that insure the appreciation of the present day. It is, as the
critic of the hour expresses himself, "too literary,"--too largely a
question of classic titles which appealed to the mid-nineteenth-century
authors whose judgment of art the twentieth century finds particularly
amusing. Henry James has somewhere held up to ridicule the early