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Ireland said of him "few men have ever impressed me so much with being possessed of so passionate a desire to mitigate the lot of human misery." It was this passion which led Toynbee to attempt more than an intellectual answer to social problems. He sought to know intimately the classes which must be most profited by improvements in industrial methods. To this end, he lectured to the workingmen of Oxford, inviting them to his house for general conversation on economic problems. He formed in this way many friendships with individual workmen. Not content with this, he threw himself into practical social work, was appointed to the Board of Guardians of the Poor and joined the Oxford Branch of the Charity Organization Society.

At a slightly earlier period he had made a yet more ambitious attempt to understand the lives of the poor through a residence in the Whitechapel district of East London. He was obliged to give up the project by reason of ill-health and it remained for others, the founders of Toynbee Hall, to put his ideals into successful execution.

Toynbee Hall was instituted as a memorial to Arnold Toynbee by his friends and admirers. A practical institution for social betterment embodying his own ideals was thought to be a tribute which he would best have appreciated. The purpose of Toynbee Hall is expressed in the appeal issued by the founders:

"For some years past the momentous spiritual and social questions involved in the conditions of the poor have awakened an increasing interest in our Universities; and the conviction has grown deeper that the problems of the future can only be solved through a more practical experience, and a closer intimacy and sympathy with the poor themselves.

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"It is the object of the 'Universities' Settlement' to link the Universities with East London and to direct the human sympathies, the energies, and the public spirit of Oxford and Cambridge to the actual conditions of town life. During the last few years, many university men, following in the steps of Denison and Arnold Toynbee, have, on leaving the Universities for London, energetically responded to the various calls for their aid. Such isolated efforts are capable of infinite expansion were the way once

laid open, and it is now proposed to offer to those who are ready a channel of immediate and useful activity and a center of right living. In a common life united by a common devotion to the welfare of the poor, those fellow workers who are able to give either their whole time or the leisure which they can spare from their occupations, will find, it is believed, a support in the pursuit of their own highest aims as well as a practical guidance which isolated and inexperienced philanthropists must lack."

Toynbee Hall has become a model for many university settlements in England and the United States and thus Arnold Toynbee is, in reality, the inspiration of a social movement which has already borne many important results and is destined to bear more. This is no small achievement for a man who died at the age of thirty-one.

Aside from the University Settlement named for him, no finer tribute to Toynbee may be found than that with which his biographer concludes the short story of his life:

"There is something which those who have known him have felt without being able to express; something which pervaded everything he said or did, something unique; irreparable, not to be stated, not to be forgotten. Most indescribable, most exquisite is this charm blending with the freshness of early youth, like the scent of innumerable flowers floating upon a gentle breeze from the ocean. Length of added years would have brought the achievement of tasks hardly begun, the maturity of thoughts freshly conceived, and the just rewards of widely extended fame and reputation; but it could not have added anything to the personal fascination of Arnold Toynbee, or enhanced the sacred regard with which all who had the great happiness to know and the great sorrow to lose him will cherish his memory while life endures."

"Love and Death"

By W. Bertrand Stevens

[George Frederick Watts was born in London, February 23, 1817, the son of a professional musician and piano-tuner. At the age of fifteen he entered the Academy, but, finding the instruction unsatisfactory, he remained only a few weeks. After this he worked in the studio of William Behnes, from whom he received no direct instruction. His training was obtained almost wholly independently. He was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1867 and a full Academician in the same year. He worked with the utmost zeal until his death, July 1, 1904.]

George Frederick Watts had high ideals which he kept always before him. He often said, "I paint ideas, not things; I paint primarily because I have something to say, and since the gift of eloquent language has been denied me, I use painting; my intention is not so much to paint pictures which shall please the eyes as to suggest great thoughts which shall speak to the imagination and to the heart and arouse all that is best and noblest in humanity." Watts aimed to paint the highest thoughts of which he was capable regardless of popular taste. He was thoroughly independent, was identified with no "school," and had no great following. Yet, he is one of the best known and most admired of the modern English painters. England, France, Germany, Italy and America have been one in paying him honor.

In common with the pre-Raphaelites, Watts felt that the English school of painting was sadly in need of regeneration. The subjects of the earlier artists had been trivial if not vulgar, and art in general was losing its power. So throughout his life the artist strove to raise the standard of art in England by his own example, often sacrificing many personal advantages to this end. Watts' work may be roughly divided into two classes-his portraits and his allegorical and mythological subjects. His first successes came through his portraits which he painted, according to his own confession, more or less as pot-boilers. But his portraits are great pictures. He realized that the essence of great portraiture is not in painting the subject in the transitory moods in which he happens to be, but in search

ing out and painting the underlying and enduring traits that make the man what he is. But it is in the field of mythology and allegory that Watts was the greatest. He believed thoroughly in an ethical art—an art that would teach through the medium of paint. He is often accused of being literary, which was, in fact, just what he wished to behe believed that ideas could be expressed as well through painting as through literature.

One of the most famous and perhaps one of the greatest of his pictures of this class is the "Love and Death." The painter conceived the picture while painting the portrait of a rich young nobleman who was gradually wasting away with consumption. The artist was deeply impressed by the utter helplessness of the young man's relatives and friends to arrest the disease in its progress. In spite of all their loving care and the means at their disposal, their efforts could avail nothing. Musing on this, the allegory of love struggling with death suggested itself to him.

The majestic figure of Death, draped in a long white garment, advances toward the door of the house of Life, unmindful of Love who struggles to prevent his entrance. Death pushes on, crushing the wings of Love whose struggles are all for naught for soon Death will have entered the house. Is here not something in the picture that we do not at first appreciate? Is there not a kindly pity in that bowed head? Is not the whole figure suggestive of that “kind Muse who puts the children to bed" to which Watts often referred?

The beauty of the conception suggests some of those beautiful grave reliefs of the Greeks in which youths and old men bid farewell to one another as they start on the road from which there is no returning. In fact, the calm beauty and serenity of the Greeks is a marked characteristic of the pictures of Watts.

The artist painted several versions of the picture, altering minor details in each case. The best known copy is that in the Tate Gallery in London.

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