GENRE, zhilN'r' (Fr., PAINTING. A term used in art to denote that class of sub jects which portray the intimate and every-day life of any people. This draws the line sharply between this class of subjects and historical painting, which depicts more or less great mo ments of national life. This class of painting is characteristic of the Dutch school by which it was first largely practiced. Its chief masters in that school were Terburg. Brower, Ostade, Rem brandt. the younger Teniers. Metzu, Gerard Dow, Frans Hals, and others. Their subjects were the familiar life of the family; street scenes and sports; festivals and picnics, tavern scenes—all that goes to make up the occupations of a people. These might be comic, serious, or pathetic, but genre painting, strictly speaking, always in cludes as a dominant note the human element. Pictures of this class are usually of small di mensions, but they are always valuable and inter esting records of contemporary life. In British art Wilkie and Hogarth are prominent examples of genre painters. Hogarth was probably the greatest master in English genre painting and his pictures portraying the weaknesses and fol lies of the life of his time are powerful parables, and full of artistic strength. Genre work was done in Spain by Velasquez and Murillo, and in France, during the eighteenth century, by Wat teau, Greuze, and others. There was a general revival of this kind of subject during the nine teenth century, and among the many painters of all nations who have practiced it we need only mention such names as Meissonier in France, Fortuny in Spain, Kraus, Defregger, and Griitz tier in Germany. See DEFREGGER; GRUTZNER; KRAUS; MEISSONIER.
GENS (Lat., race). A word sometimes used by the Romans to designate a whole community, the members of which were not necessarily con nected by any known ties of blood, though some such connection was probably always taken for granted. In this sense we hear of the gens Lati norum, Campanorum, etc. But it had a far more definite meaning than this in the constitutional law of Rome. According to Scuvola, the pontifex, those alone belonged to the same gens, or were `gentiles,' who satisfied the four following con ditions: (1) Who bore the same name; (2) who were born of freemen; (3) who had no slave among their ancestors; and (4) who had suf fered no capitis diminutio (reduction from a superior to an inferior condition). In the iden tity of name, some sort of approach to a common origin seems to be implied. The gens thus con
sisted of many families, but all these families were supposed to be more or less nearly allied by blood.
The Roman form of organization is found among all races and in every part of the world, and is now known generically, by the common consent of ethnologists, as the clan (q.v.), al though in literature and in history gens is the familiar term. The clan is a body of kindred wider than a. family or household, and narrower than a tribe (q.v.), and recognizing relationship, together with the right to names and to property, in one line of descent only, through the mother, but not through the father, or through the father, but not through the mother. The primitive elan, found in savagery and the lower stages of barbarism, is a totemic group (see TOTEM), or `totem kin.' Its members hold sacred some spe cies or variety of plant or animal, regarded as female in sex, and claim to be descended from it. Such are in many cases the clans of the Austra lian aborigines and of the North American In dians. Clans thus tracing descent through the mother are called matronymic; while the clans found in a higher stage of social evolution, as among the Arabs, the Greeks, and Romans, and the Slays, Celts, and Teutons at the dawn of European history, in which descent is reckoned through fathers, are called patronymic. The Greek yives, and its equivalent form the Roman !yens, were highly developed patronymic clans. The discovery that the totemic organization of the North American Indians was in all essentials like the Roman gens, except in being matronymic, was made by Lewis H. Morgan. From this discovery to that of the practical universality of the clan as the characteristic social form of tribal com munities was but a step, and the wider general ization was offered by Morgan in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity. The functions of this clan are economic, religious, and juristic. It usually holds common property, and a burial place. It regulates marriages; in the primitive clan the clansman may not marry his own clans woman. This restriction was breaking down in the Roman yens at the beginning of the authentic historic period. All clansmen were bound to de fend one another, and to redress one another's injuries. In Morgan's writings the word gens is everywhere used for clan, and his use of gentile to distinguish tribal from civil society has been usually followed.