Crome detested, and after a struggle he would throw down his brushes, scream. ing, 'Do you think I am a dog?' He would then rush out of the house, not perhaps to proceed immediately to his engagements, but the spell having been broken, it was not long before he remembered them.

away

It was by teaching that this man had to live whose every hour from his canvas was a loss to posterity. In one respect, perhaps, his duties were not unfavourable to his art, they necessitated his driving about the country and seeing it under every aspect.

Of Vincent's life hardly anything is known, but that he, like Cotman, was often in lack of money. It is matter for regret that round this simple fact a dark story of dissipation has been woven, a story whose growth can easily be traced in the dictionaries. In the Redgraves's Century of Painters, for example, published in 1866, 'Vincent fell into bad habits and money difficulties, his pictures were to be seen in the shop windows of dealers' ; in English Art in the Public Galleries of London, published in 1888, this unhappy man fell into evil ways, and, sinking lower and lower, finally disappeared'; while in the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1899, 'his health suffered from his intemperate habits, and he died perhaps by his own hand.'

I have known two men [wrote Arthur Stark], who were on terms of the closest intimacy with Vincent, and beyond his being a somewhat clumsy creature, and wearing a sky-blue coat, I never heard of any special foible. I will not attempt the notoriously difficult feat of proving a negative, but will say that the charges against Vincent of bibulousness, extravagance, &c., are not only not proven, but are not asserted as far as I can discover by anybody that has a right to speak. He faded away nobody knows how, nobody just then caring to inquire how, and it is unjust when he is famous to invent for him an exit that shall be ignobly dramatic. Poor Vincent's eyes were always directed to the sky, he was forever studying that which he has painted so exquisitely. His companions called him Old Sky-eye, and by drawing his attention to a passing effect of cloud often succeeded in landing him in a dyke, or in damaging his shins over a fallen tree. A gentle, kindly soul who loved nature first and art next, and had no time or thought to spare for common vice and folly, this is how I have had him represented to me by those who knew him.

To Arthur Stark at the close of life the art of the school was a tale that had been told, a life that had been led. Having in earlier life achieved some measure of success, in later years he experienced not a little neglect and did not exhibit his pictures as often as formerly, although he retained his powers unimpaired. A high-minded yet simple English gentleman, he watched the tide of fashions in painting flow by, and for a while away from him, with a genial interest, and turned again to nature and art, to which he ever brought the ardour of a young lover. He was deeply read in the poets, finding constantly in them, and especially in Shakespeare, his own observations of nature illumined. The charm of his society was irresistible-light-hearted and debonair, he was the life of every company in which he was met.

His religion was the simpler faith of an older day, the faith of Colonel Newcome. Latterly, he found in a severe illness no reason for ceasing the pursuit of his art. One night in October he had a vision-the spirit of art appeared to him in a dream and adjured him to paint not the material aspect but the very soul of autumn, holding for a moment before his eyes a marvellous picture. So vivid was his recollection of the scene thus spiritually limned that the next day he began to paint it, but a fortnight later his own autumn, fruitful and ripe, was ended.

ARTHUR P. NICHOLSON.

A RIDE THROUGH
THROUGH

BOSNIA AND THE HERCEGOVINA

THE tourist who does' Bosnia from the railway sees, it is true, a good deal of what is most worth seeing in the country. His train passes the medieval castles of Doboï, Maglaï, and Vranduk on the Bosna; he stays at Sarajevo-which, in spite of some veneer of European civilisation, is still, with its fascinating bazaar and its venerable mosques, purely Eastern at heart; he sees Koinica, and Mostar, with its exquisite single-span Roman bridge and picturesque Turkish quarter; he traverses the fine gorges of the Narenta and passes through the Hercegovina, condemning the barrenness of the scenery, down to Ragusa, and so on to the better-known cities of Dalmatia. Or, it may be, he hardens his heart and journeys back up the railway to Jaice (that wonderful town rising above its great waterfalls to the last fortress of the Bosnian kings), and then he drives-for the railway inconsistently comes to a stop at Jaice-along an admirable road through the romantic defiles of the Vrbas River northwards to Banjaluka, where he finds a train once more which will, in its own good time, bring him on to Agram, and so back to civilised Europe.

It is perhaps as well that the conventional tourist attempts nothing further, for at Mostar, Jablanica, and Jaice he has stayed at the three best hotels in the country; and if he goes further afield, he must be content at times with rough quarters and poor fare, and for means of transit perhaps a dilapidated carriage or a humble packhorse. The country inns, which are usually kept by Austrians, are not, however, in any sense impossible; there are excellent carriage roads between all the more important places, and Bosnian horses, though they often look wretched enough, always manage to reach their destination in surprisingly good time and with surprisingly few disasters. For those who think that the real pleasure of travel begins when the railway is left behind, the few drawbacks are outweighed in Bosnia a hundred times by the varied charms of the scenery, the glimpses of primitive peasant life which such a journey brings before the traveller, and the interest of the problems-political, racial, 685

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economical, religious-which Austro-Hungary has to face in the Occupied Provinces.

It was my good fortune to spend last summer in these regions under specially favourable circumstances. Through the courtesy of the Austro-Hungarian Finance Minister, Herr von Burian, in whose charge the government of the Provinces lies, I was accorded an 'open order '-a request, that is, to the officials and gendarmerie of Bosnia and the Hercegovina to afford the traveller such help and facilities as may be needed. 'If you do not have an open order,' I had been told before I left England, 'you will be allowed to go nowhere and to see nothing. But, then, if you do have the order, you will still see nothing, for the officials will escort you everywhere, and let you see just what they think fit, and so in either case you will come back no wiser than you went out.' Nearly four months of unhampered travel, chiefly on horseback in the remote parts of the Provinces, and almost always alone, amply disproved the truth of this warning at least, as far as opportunity of seeing the country and of talking freely with people of every class and creed is concerned. Not the least pleasant and instructive parts of the journey were the conversations with the 'Herr Kreisvorstehers' and 'Herr Bezirksvorstehers,' who are responsible for the local government of the Provinces, or the rides with the gendarmerie officers, who generally know every stone of their difficult districts.

The northern stretch of Bosnia, the rich land drained by the Save, is English in character, an undulating country divided by hedges and enriched with woods. South of this tract the mountains begin to rise; here and there the valleys that mark the course of a river widen into a fertile polie, or field, studded with homesteads and orchards, the river itself bordered by a line of silver willows; here and there a stretch of plain, such as the rolling expanse of Podromanje or the bleak plateaux of Gatzko and Nevesinje, and, to the west, of Kupres and Livno, opens between the ranges. But these strips of level country are only incidents in the tangled mass of mountains which extends with scarcely an interruption southwards to Greece itself. The finest and widest mountain view I saw was from a lovely upland meadow, starred with myriads of narcissi, that sloped steeply upwards to a sudden knife-edge. The spotcalled by the peasants Sviezda, the Star-where our horses stood was scarcely three thousand feet in elevation, but it was open and treeless, and beyond the narrow plain below us, as far as the eye could see, range after range, rising in height as they receded into the distance, crossed the landscape, now wooded, now rocky in outline, stretching eastward to dark heights in Stara Serbia and Macedonia, westward to the white cliffs of Bielastica, near Sarajevo, and, south, to the bare peaks of the Hercegovina, away to the snows of far Dormitor, highest of Montenegrin summits, some sixty miles distant.

The heights of Bosnia, ranging as they do only up to about seven thousand feet, bear no comparison in scale with those of Central Europe, but the deep and narrow gorges of the Drina, the fantastic pinnacles that outline the walls of the Sutieska Pass, and the gaunt precipices of Maglic and Todorac have a grandeur of their own that is intensified by the loneliness of their surroundings; and it is difficult to imagine anything finer than the confluence of the Tara and the Piva, where the two Montenegrin rivers, blue as the wing of a kingfisher, come through their deep wooded defiles to join their waters beneath the towering cliffs of Stiepanstiena. The Slav names-Servian, especially the long-drawn dialect of Bosnia, has been well called the Italian of Slavonic tongues-Lelia Planina, Mramoria Suma, Jahorina, Studena Gora (the cold mountain), have an almost Carib wealth of full soft vowels, and not less expressive are the descriptive names 'Ranjen ' (wounded), where the range is cleft and torn, or 'Volujak' for the rugged mass that forms part of the wall of Montenegro.

The wolf, the bear, and great birds of prey still haunt the remoter mountain fastnesses, but a price is set on every head that is brought in and every egg that is collected, and already wild life is far less abundant here than it is in Albania or Bulgaria. I saw six baby wolves which had been brought in by a peasant to meet their doom, but I was a day too late for a drive for a bear which had killed several animals in a mountain village. A practised eye may sometimes detect the movements of chamois among the rocks or near the mountain tarns, and we often startled a fox or a roe-deer in the forests.

Nothing can be more lovely in the early months of summer than the high Alpine pastures, when the trees stand back round a level lawn or a steep slope of marshy meadow, rich with a wealth of flowers -pink and yellow lilies, giant orchises, snowflake, Solomon's seal, gentians, and the great yellow-globe ranunculus. Many flowers are familiar in England-pansies, veronicas, vetches, polygalas, yellow flax, and lupins-but here they are larger and more intense in colour in the perpetual moisture and clear air of these high regions. I remember one chair or livada (the Turkish names have a music of their own), a little space between sombre enclosing fir trees, that seemed to sing with flowers-sheets of tall blue campanula, pale meadowsweet, and pink ragged robin.

It is to these Alpine pastures that the peasants from the Karst plains, tall, swarthy Hercegovinans, splendid in their red jackets and defiant red caps, have been accustomed from time immemorial to bring their flocks for the three months of summer, climbing up by the same stony tracks worn by their ancestors centuries ago. The 'Preki,' or 'Guzni Put,' the near or narrow way of the peasant, is a thing to be remembered in the Hercegovinan mountains, giant steps or slides in the rock, and below a steep drop of hundreds of feet, down which it seems the horses must inevitably hurl themselves.