Oliver Optic - "Haste and Waste"

Kate Douglas Wiggin - "Homespun Tales"

Christopher Leadem - "Highland Ballad"

Mark Twain - "A Horse's Tale"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: English literary criticism

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In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life
is almost colourless. Criticism, indeed, has cleared away much of the
gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and
Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno. But
in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even
go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is
Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first
taught him art. Only two things happened to him--two things which he
shared with other artists: he was invited to Rome to paint in the
Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under the influence of
Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of
religious melancholy, which lasted till his death in 1515, according
to the received date. Vasari says that he plunged into the study of
Dante, and even wrote a comment on the _Divine Comedy_. But it seems
strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost
wishes that some document might come to light, which, fixing the date
of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his
dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481,
the blank spaces left at the beginning of every canto, for the hand
of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto
of the _Inferno_, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by
way of experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the
three impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much
awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the
followers of Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not
learned to put that weight of meaning into outward things--light,
colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the _Divine Comedy_
involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have
found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with
incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety,
three phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often
a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words of a poet,
which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key
when translated into visible form, make one regret that he has not
rather chosen for illustration the more subdued imagery of the
_Purgatorio_. Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell",
there is an inventive force about the fire taking hold on the upturned
soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere translation
of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene of the
Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances
of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought
of the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland,
with arch baby faces and _mignon_ forms, drawing their tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have
been a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work
of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that
period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the
hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering
reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and
in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion
of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or
less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary
painters; they are almost impassive spectators of the action before
them. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data
before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this
interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and
isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante,
the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all
its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by
some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one
else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes,
that all may share it, with visible circumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,
heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths
of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim figures
move under that name in contemporary history) was the reputed author
of a poem, still unedited, _La Citta Divina_, which represented the
human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of
Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of
that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect
in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been
only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has
recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified
existence--_Glorias_, as they were called, like that in which Giotto
painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying
in a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it
hung was closed. Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless
about philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine
of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. But
Botticelli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the disciple
of Savonarola, may well have let such theories come and go across him.
True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar sentiment
with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in
a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss
about them--the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and
energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through
all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts: that middle world in which men take no side in
great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals.
He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by
any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest
is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the
untempered evil of Orcagna's _Inferno_; but with men and women, in
their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed
sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but
saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from
which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this
sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the
true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so
forcible a realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,
sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during
that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly any
collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into
which the attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you
have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed
to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and
more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the
Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with
those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or
abject even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness,
and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds
in her hands the "Desire of all nations", is one of those who are
neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her choice is on her face.
The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as
when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise
at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very
caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and
who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been
able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object
almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides
her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the
_Ave_, and the _Magnificat_, and the _Gaude Maria_, and the young
angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager
to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. But the pen almost drops
from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and
her true children are those others, among whom, in her rude home, the
intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on
their irregular faces which you see in startled animals--gipsy children,
such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long
brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become _enfants du choeur_,
with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on
their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical
subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the _Uffizii_,
of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the
middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its
strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint
conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless
nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by
a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you
have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may
think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and
the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come
to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour
is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon
them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you
will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that
quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper
than the works of the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of
the Greeks as they really were, of their difference from ourselves,
of the aspects of their outward life, we know far more than Botticelli,
or his most learned contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has
taken off the edge of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what
we owe to the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's
you have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned
back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world in which
it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the
industry of realization, with which Botticelli carries out his
intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the
human mind of the imaginative system of which this is perhaps the
central subject. The light is indeed cold--mere sunless dawn; but a
later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the
better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as
it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until
the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that
the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of
love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across
the gray water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she
sails, the sea "showing his teeth", as it moves, in thin lines of foam,
and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline,
plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's
flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether
pleasurable, and it was partly an incompleteness of resources,
inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it.
But his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is
unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess
of pleasure, as the depository of a great power over the lives of men.

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result
of a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain
condition, its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a
character of loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the
shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that
this conveys into his work somewhat more than painting usually attains
of the true complexion of humanity. He paints the story of the goddess
of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her birth from the sea,
but never without some shadow of death in the gray flesh and wan
flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the
divine child, and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower
humanity. The same figure--tradition connects it with Simonetta, the
mistress of Giuliano de' Medici-appears again as Judith, returning
home across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the
moment of revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming
a burthen; as _Justice_, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look
of self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide;
and again as _Veritas_, in the allegorical picture of _Calumnia_, where
one may note in passing the suggestiveness of an accident which
identifies the image of Truth with the person of Venus. We might trace
the same sentiment through his engravings; but his share in them is
doubtful, and the object of this brief study has been attained if I
have defined aright the temper in which he worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli--a
secondary painter--a proper subject for general criticism? There are
a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has
become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that
they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro
Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism,
general criticism may be very well employed in that sort of
interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general
culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of
technical or antiquarian treatment. But, besides those great men, there
is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their
own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which
we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general
culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their
charm strongly, and are often the object of a special diligence and
a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about
them the stress of a great name and authority. Of this select number
Botticelli is one. He has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident
promise, which belong to the earlier Renaissance itself, and make it
perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the mind. In
studying his work one begins to understand to how great a place in
human culture the art of Italy had been called.

THE END.