ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE
The first building erected for Hull-House contained an art gallery
well lighted for day and evening use, and our first exhibit of
loaned pictures was opened in June, 1891, by Mr. And Mrs. Barnett
of London. It is always pleasant to associate their hearty
sympathy with that first exhibit, and thus to connect it with
their pioneer efforts at Toynbee Hall to secure for working people
the opportunity to know the best art, and with their establishment
of the first permanent art gallery in an industrial quarter.
We took pride in the fact that our first exhibit contained some of
the best pictures Chicago afforded, and we conscientiously insured
them against fire and carefully guarded them by night and day.
We had five of these exhibits during two years, after the gallery
was completed: two of oil paintings, one of old engravings and
etchings, one of water colors, and one of pictures especially
selected for use in the public schools. These exhibits were
surprisingly well attended and thousands of votes were cast for the
most popular pictures. Their value to the neighborhood of course
had to be determined by each one of us according to the value he
attached to beauty and the escape it offers from dreary reality
into the realm of the imagination. Miss Starr always insisted that
the arts should receive adequate recognition at Hull-House and
urged that one must always remember "the hungry individual soul
which without art will have passed unsolaced and unfed, followed by
other souls who lack the impulse his should have given."
The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the older immigrants
do not expect the solace of art in this country; an Italian
expressed great surprise when he found that we, although
Americans, still liked pictures, and said quite naively that he
didn't know that Americans cared for anything but dollars--that
looking at pictures was something people only did in Italy.
The extreme isolation of the Italian colony was demonstrated by the
fact that he did not know that there was a public art gallery in
the city nor any houses in which pictures were regarded as treasures.
A Greek was much surprised to see a photograph of the Acropolis
at Hull-House because he had lived in Chicago for thirteen years
and had never before met any Americans who knew about this
foremost glory of the world. Before he left Greece he had
imagined that Americans would be most eager to see pictures of
Athens, and as he was a graduate of a school of technology, he
had prepared a book of colored drawings and had made a collection
of photographs which he was sure Americans would enjoy. But
although from his fruit stand near one of the large railroad
stations he had conversed with many Americans and had often tried
to lead the conversation back to ancient Greece, no one had
responded, and he had at last concluded that "the people of
Chicago knew nothing of ancient times."
The loan exhibits were continued until the Chicago Art Institute
was opened free to the public on Sunday afternoons and parties
were arranged at Hull-House and conducted there by a guide. In
time even these parties were discontinued as the galleries became
better known in all parts of the city and the Art Institute
management did much to make pictures popular.
From the first a studio was maintained at Hull-House which has
developed through the changing years under the direction of Miss
Benedict, one of the residents who is a member of the faculty in
the Art Institute. Buildings on the Hull-House quadrangle
furnish studios for artists who find something of the same spirit
in the contiguous Italian colony that the French artist is
traditionally supposed to discover in his beloved Latin Quarter.
These artists uncover something of the picturesque in the foreign
colonies, which they have reproduced in painting, etching, and
lithography. They find their classes filled not only by young
people possessing facility and sometimes talent, but also by
older people to whom the studio affords the one opportunity of
escape from dreariness; a widow with four children who
supplemented a very inadequate income by teaching the piano, for
six years never missed her weekly painting lesson because it was
"her one pleasure"; another woman, whose youth and strength had
gone into the care of an invalid father, poured into her
afternoon in the studio once a week, all of the longing for
self-expression which she habitually suppressed.
Perhaps the most satisfactory results of the studio have been
obtained through the classes of young men who are engaged in the
commercial arts, and who are glad to have an opportunity to work
out their own ideas. This is true of young engravers and
lithographers; of the men who have to do with posters and
illustrations in various ways. The little pile of stones and the
lithographer's handpress in a corner of the studio have been used
in many an experiment, as has a set of beautiful type loaned to
Hull-House by a bibliophile.
The work of the studio almost imperceptibly merged into the
crafts and well within the first decade a shop was opened at
Hull-House under the direction of several residents who were also
members of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. This shop is not
merely a school where people are taught and then sent forth to
use their teaching in art according to their individual
initiative and opportunity, but where those who have already been
carefully trained, may express the best they can in wood or
metal. The Settlement soon discovers how difficult it is to put
a fringe of art on the end of a day spent in a factory. We
constantly see young people doing overhurried work. Wrapping
bars of soap in pieces of paper might at least give the pleasure
of accuracy and repetition if it could be done at a normal pace,
but when paid for by the piece, speed becomes the sole
requirement and the last suggestion of human interest is taken
away. In contrast to this the Hull-House shop affords many
examples of the restorative power in the exercise of a genuine
craft; a young Russian who, like too many of his countrymen, had
made a desperate effort to fit himself for a learned profession,
and who had almost finished his course in a night law school,
used to watch constantly the work being done in the metal shop at
Hull-House. One evening in a moment of sudden resolve, he took
off his coat, sat down at one of the benches, and began to work,
obviously as a very clever silversmith. He had long concealed
his craft because he thought it would hurt his efforts as a
lawyer and because he imagined an office more honorable and "more
American" than a shop. As he worked on during his two leisure
evenings each week, his entire bearing and conversation
registered the relief of one who abandons the effort he is not
fitted for and becomes a man on his own feet, expressing himself
through a familiar and delicate technique.
Miss Starr at length found herself quite impatient with her role
of lecturer on the arts, while all the handicraft about her was
untouched by beauty and did not even reflect the interest of the
workman. She took a training in bookbinding in London under Mr.
Cobden-Sanderson and established her bindery at Hull-House in
which design and workmanship, beauty and thoroughness are taught
to a small number of apprentices.
From the very first winter, concerts which are still continued
were given every Sunday afternoon in the Hull-House drawing-room
and later, as the audiences increased, in the larger halls. For
these we are indebted to musicians from every part of the city.
Mr. William Tomlins early trained large choruses of adults as his
assistants did of children, and the response to all of these
showed that while the number of people in our vicinity caring for
the best music was not large, they constituted a steady and
appreciative group. It was in connection with these first
choruses that a public-spirited citizen of Chicago offered a
prize for the best labor song, competition to be open to the
entire country. The responses to the offer literally filled
three large barrels and speaking at least for myself as one of
the bewildered judges, we were more disheartened by their quality
than even by their overwhelming bulk. Apparently the workers of
America are not yet ready to sing, although I recall a creditable
chorus trained at Hull-House for a large meeting in sympathy with
the anthracite coal strike in which the swinging lines
"Who was it made the coal?
Our God as well as theirs."
seemed to relieve the tension of the moment. Miss Eleanor Smith,
the head of the Hull-House Music School, who had put the words to
music, performed the same office for the "Sweatshop" of the
Yiddish poet, the translation of which presents so graphically
the bewilderment and tedium of the New York shop that it might be
applied to almost any other machinery industry as the first verse
indicates: --
"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,
The clashing and the clamor shut me in,
Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,
I cannot think or feel amid the din."
It may be that this plaint explains the lack of labor songs in
this period of industrial maladjustment when the worker is
overmastered by his very tools. In addition to sharing with our
neighborhood the best music we could procure, we have
conscientiously provided careful musical instruction that at
least a few young people might understand those old usages of
art; that they might master its trade secrets, for after all it
is only through a careful technique that artistic ability can
express itself and be preserved.
From the beginning we had classes in music, and the Hull-House
Music School, which is housed in quarters of its own in our
quieter court, was opened in 1893. The school is designed to
give a thorough musical instruction to a limited number of
children. From the first lessons they are taught to compose and
to reduce to order the musical suggestions which may come to
them, and in this wise the school has sometimes been able to
recover the songs of the immigrants through their children. Some
of these folk songs have never been committed to paper, but have
survived through the centuries because of a touch of undying
poetry which the world has always cherished; as in the song of a
Russian who is digging a post hole and finds his task dull and
difficult until he strikes a stratum of red sand, which in
addition to making digging easy, reminds him of the red hair of
his sweetheart, and all goes merrily as the song lifts into a
joyous melody. I recall again the almost hilarious enjoyment of
the adult audience to whom it was sung by the children who had
revived it, as well as the more sober appreciation of the hymns
taken from the lips of the cantor, whose father before him had
officiated in the synagogue.
The recitals and concerts given by the school are attended by
large and appreciative audiences. On the Sunday before Christmas
the program of Christmas songs draws together people of the most
diverging faiths. In the deep tones of the memorial organ
erected at Hull-House, we realize that music is perhaps the most
potent agent for making the universal appeal and inducing men to
forget their differences.
Some of the pupils in the music school have developed during the
years into trained musicians and are supporting themselves in
their chosen profession. On the other hand, we constantly see
the most promising musical ability extinguished when the young
people enter industries which so sap their vitality that they
cannot carry on serious study in the scanty hours outside of
factory work. Many cases indisputably illustrate this: a
Bohemian girl, who, in order to earn money for pressing family
needs, first ruined her voice in a six months' constant
vaudeville engagement, returned to her trade working overtime in
a vain effort to continue the vaudeville income; another young
girl whom Hull-House had sent to the high school so long as her
parents consented, because we realized that a beautiful voice is
often unavailable through lack of the informing mind, later
extinguished her promise in a tobacco factory; a third girl who
had supported her little sisters since she was fourteen, eagerly
used her fine voice for earning money at entertainments held late
after her day's work, until exposure and fatigue ruined her
health as well as a musician's future; a young man whose
music-loving family gave him every possible opportunity, and who
produced some charming and even joyous songs during the long
struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his death, had made a
brave beginning, not only as a teacher of music but as a
composer. In the little service held at Hull-House in his
memory, when the children sang his composition, "How Sweet is the
Shepherd's Sweet Lot," it was hard to realize that such an
interpretive pastoral could have been produced by one whose
childhood had been passed in a crowded city quarter.
Even that bitter experience did not prepare us for the sorrowful
year when six promising pupils out of a class of fifteen,
developed tuberculosis. It required but little penetration to
see that during the eight years the class of fifteen school
children had come together to the music school, they had
approximately an even chance, but as soon as they reached the
legal working age only a scanty moiety of those who became
self-supporting could endure the strain of long hours and bad
air. Thus the average human youth, "With all the sweetness of
the common dawn," is flung into the vortex of industrial life
wherein the everyday tragedy escapes us save when one of them
becomes conspicuously unfortunate. Twice in one year we were
compelled
"To find the inheritance of this poor child
His little kingdom of a forced grave."
It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring
her own offspring and the world has come to justify even that
sacrifice, but we are unfortified and unsolaced when we see the
children of Art devoured, not by her, but by the uncouth
stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly ruthless and brutal to
her own children, is quickly fatal to the offspring of the
gentler mother. And so schools in art for those who go to work
at the age when more fortunate young people are still sheltered
and educated, constantly epitomize one of the haunting problems
of life; why do we permit the waste of this most precious human
faculty, this consummate possession of civilization? When we
fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it runs
out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost.
The universal desire for the portrayal of life lying quite outside
of personal experience evinces itself in many forms. One of the
conspicuous features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial
quarters, is the persistency with which the entire population
attends the theater. The very first day I saw Halsted Street a
long line of young men and boys stood outside the gallery entrance
of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday matinee to begin at
two o'clock, although it was only high noon. This waiting crowd
might have been seen every Sunday afternoon during the twenty
years which have elapsed since then. Our first Sunday evening in
Hull-House, when a group of small boys sat on our piazza and told
us "about things around here," their talk was all of the theater
and of the astonishing things they had seen that afternoon.
But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits and purposes
of this group of boys because they much preferred talking about
the theater to contemplating their own lives, so it was all along
the line; the young men told us their ambitions in the phrases of
stage heroes, and the girls, so far as their romantic dreams
could be shyly put into words, possessed no others but those
soiled by long use in the melodrama. All of these young people
looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted
Street theater as their one opportunity to see life. The sort of
melodrama they see there has recently been described as "the ten
commandments written in red fire." Certainly the villain always
comes to a violent end, and the young and handsome hero is
rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, usually the daughter
of a millionaire, but after all that is not a portrayal of the
morality of the ten commandments any more than of life itself.
Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared to be the one
agency which freed the boys and girls from that destructive
isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by
themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty
into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the
bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear
testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration
of this came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted
Street through an incident in the Italian colony, where the men
have always boasted that they were able to guard their daughters
from the dangers of city life, and until evil Italians entered
the business of the "white slave traffic," their boast was well
founded. The first Italian girl to go astray known to the
residents of Hull-House, was so fascinated by the stage that on
her way home from work she always loitered outside a theater
before the enticing posters. Three months after her elopement
with an actor, her distracted mother received a picture of her
dressed in the men's clothes in which she appeared in vaudeville.
Her family mourned her as dead and her name was never mentioned
among them nor in the entire colony. In further illustration of
an overmastering desire to see life as portrayed on the stage are
two young girls whose sober parents did not approve of the
theater and would allow no money for such foolish purposes. In
sheer desperation the sisters evolved a plot that one of them
would feign a toothache, and while she was having her tooth
pulled by a neighboring dentist the other would steal the gold
crowns from his table, and with the money thus procured they
could attend the vaudeville theater every night on their way home
from work. Apparently the pain and wrongdoing did not weigh for
a moment against the anticipated pleasure. The plan was carried
out to the point of selling the gold crowns to a pawnbroker when
the disappointed girls were arrested.
All this effort to see the play took place in the years before
the five-cent theaters had become a feature of every crowded city
thoroughfare and before their popularity had induced the
attendance of two and a quarter million people in the United
States every twenty-four hours. The eagerness of the penniless
children to get into these magic spaces is responsible for an
entire crop of petty crimes made more easy because two children
are admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour
is late and the theater nearly deserted. The Hull-House
residents were aghast at the early popularity of these mimic
shows, and in the days before the inspection of films and the
present regulations for the five-cent theaters we established at
Hull-House a moving picture show. Although its success justified
its existence, it was so obviously but one in the midst of
hundreds that it seemed much more advisable to turn our attention
to the improvement of all of them or rather to assist as best we
could, the successful efforts in this direction by the Juvenile
Protective Association.
However, long before the five-cent theater was even heard of, we
had accumulated much testimony as to the power of the drama, and
we would have been dull indeed if we had not availed ourselves of
the use of the play at Hull-House, not only as an agent of
recreation and education, but as a vehicle of self-expression for
the teeming young life all about us.
Long before the Hull-House theater was built we had many plays,
first in the drawing-room and later in the gymnasium. The young
people's clubs never tired of rehearsing and preparing for these
dramatic occasions, and we also discovered that older people were
almost equally ready and talented. We quickly learned that no
celebration at Thanksgiving was so popular as a graphic portrayal on
the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we were often put to it to
reduce to dramatic effects the great days of patriotism and religion.
At one of our early Christmas celebrations Longfellow's "Golden
Legend" was given, the actors portraying it with the touch of the
miracle play spirit which it reflects. I remember an old blind
man, who took the part of a shepherd, said, at the end of the last
performance, "Kind Heart," a name by which he always addressed me,
"it seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some
of these things said. I am glad we had so many performances, for
I think I can remember them to the end. It is getting hard for me
to listen to reading, but the different voices and all made this
very plain." Had he not perhaps made a legitimate demand upon the
drama, that it shall express for us that which we have not been
able to formulate for ourselves, that it shall warm us with a
sense of companionship with the experiences of others; does not
every genuine drama present our relations to each other and to the
world in which we find ourselves in such wise as may fortify us to
the end of the journey?
The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House have utilized
our little stage in an endeavor to reproduce the past of their
own nations through those immortal dramas which have escaped from
the restraining bond of one country into the land of the universal.
A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, who often feel that
their history and classic background are completely ignored by
Americans, and that they are easily confused with the more
ignorant immigrants from other parts of southeastern Europe,
welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text.
With expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a
classic play, they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the
Hull-House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors who felt
that they were "showing forth the glory of Greece" to "ignorant
Americans." The scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand
and followed the play with real enjoyment, did not in the least
realize that the revelation of the love of Greek poets was mutual
between the audience and the actors. The Greeks have quite
recently assisted an enthusiast in producing "Electra," while the
Lithuanians, the Poles, and other Russian subjects often use the
Hull-House stage to present plays in their own tongue, which shall
at one and the same time keep alive their sense of participation
in the great Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in
regard to it. There is something still more appealing in the
yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their
situation in America. I recall a play written by an Italian
playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent break
between Americanized sons and old country parents, so touchingly
that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience.
Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had
had the same experience as himself, and did the knowledge free
each one from a sense of isolation and an injured belief that his
children were the worst of all?
This effort to understand life through its dramatic portrayal, to
see one's own participation intelligibly set forth, becomes
difficult when one enters the field of social development, but
even here it is not impossible if a Settlement group is
constantly searching for new material.
A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly was kindly
dramatized for us by the author who also superintended its
presentation upon the Hull-House stage. The little drama
presented the untutored effort of a trades-union man to secure
for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, the glamour of
martyrdom, which so often seems to belong solely to the nonunion
forces. The presentation of the play was attended by an audience
of trades-unionists and employers and those other people who are
supposed to make public opinion. Together they felt the moral
beauty of the man's conclusion that "it's the side that suffers
most that will win out in this war--the saints is the only ones
that has got the world under their feet--we've got to do the way
they done if the unions is to stand," so completely that it
seemed quite natural that he should forfeit his life upon the
truth of this statement.
The dramatic arts have gradually been developed at Hull-House
through amateur companies, one of which has held together for
more than fifteen years. The members were originally selected
from the young people who had evinced talent in the plays the
social clubs were always giving, but the association now adds to
itself only as a vacancy occurs. Some of them have developed
almost a professional ability, although contrary to all
predictions and in spite of several offers, none of them have
taken to a stage career. They present all sorts of plays from
melodrama and comedy to those of Shaw, Ibsen, and Galsworthy.
The latter are surprisingly popular, perhaps because of their
sincere attempt to expose the shams and pretenses of contemporary
life and to penetrate into some of its perplexing social and
domestic situations. Through such plays the stage may become a
pioneer teacher of social righteousness.
I have come to believe, however, that the stage may do more than
teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure
the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented
in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete.
That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was
remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to
simulate life itself.
This function of the stage, as a reconstructing and reorganizing
agent of accepted moral truths, came to me with overwhelming
force as I listened to the Passion Play at Oberammergau one
beautiful summer's day in 1900. The peasants who portrayed
exactly the successive scenes of the wonderful Life, who used
only the very words found in the accepted version of the Gospels,
yet curiously modernized and reorientated the message. They made
clear that the opposition to the young Teacher sprang from the
merchants whose traffic in the temple He had disturbed and from
the Pharisees who were dependent upon them for support. Their
query was curiously familiar, as they demanded the antecedents of
the Radical who dared to touch vested interests, who presumed to
dictate the morality of trade, and who insulted the marts of
honest merchants by calling them "a den of thieves." As the play
developed, it became clear that this powerful opposition had
friends in Church and State, that they controlled influences
which ramified in all directions. They obviously believed in
their statement of the case and their very wealth and position in
the community gave their words such weight that finally all of
their hearers were convinced that the young Agitator must be done
away with in order that the highest interests of society might be
conserved. These simple peasants made it clear that it was the
money power which induced one of the Agitator's closest friends
to betray him, and the villain of the piece, Judas himself, was
only a man who was so dazzled by money, so under the domination
of all it represented, that he was perpetually blind to the
spiritual vision unrolling before him. As I sat through the long
summer day, seeing the shadows on the beautiful mountain back of
the open stage shift from one side to the other and finally grow
long and pointed in the soft evening light, my mind was filled
with perplexing questions. Did the dramatization of the life of
Jesus set forth its meaning more clearly and conclusively than
talking and preaching could possibly do as a shadowy following of
the command "to do the will"?
The peasant actors whom I had seen returning from mass that
morning had prayed only to portray the life as He had lived it
and, behold, out of their simplicity and piety arose this modern
version which even Harnack was only then venturing to suggest to
his advanced colleagues in Berlin. Yet the Oberammergau fold
were very like thousands of immigrant men and women of Chicago,
both in their experiences and in their familiarity with the hard
facts of life, and throughout that day as my mind dwelt on my
far-away neighbors, I was reproached with the sense of an
ungarnered harvest.
Of course such a generally uplifted state comes only at rare
moments, while the development of the little theater at
Hull-House has not depended upon the moods of any one, but upon
the genuine enthusiasm and sustained effort of a group of
residents, several of them artists who have ungrudgingly given
their time to it year after year. This group has long fostered
junior dramatic associations, through which it seems possible to
give a training in manners and morals more directly than through
any other medium. They have learned to determine very cleverly
the ages at which various types of the drama are most congruous
and expressive of the sentiments of the little troupes, from the
fairy plays such as "Snow-White" and "Puss-in-Boots" which appeal
to the youngest children, to the heroic plays of "William Tell,"
"King John," and "Wat Tyler" for the older lads, and to the
romances and comedies which set forth in stately fashion the
elaborated life which so many young people admire. A group of
Jewish boys gave a dramatic version of the story of Joseph and
his brethren and again of Queen Esther. They had almost a sense
of proprietorship in the fine old lines and were pleased to bring
from home bits of Talmudic lore for the stage setting. The same
club of boys at one time will buoyantly give a roaring comedy and
five years later will solemnly demand a drama dealing with modern
industrial conditions. The Hull-House theater is also rented
from time to time to members of the Young People's Socialist
League who give plays both in Yiddish and English which reduce
their propaganda to conversation. Through such humble
experiments as the Hull-House stage, as well as through the more
ambitious reforms which are attempted in various parts of the
country, the theatre may at last be restored to its rightful
place in the community.
There have been times when our little stage was able to serve the
theatre libre. A Chicago troupe, finding it difficult to break into
a trust theater, used it one winter twice a week for the
presentation of Ibsen and old French comedy. A visit from the Irish
poet Yeats inspired us to do our share towards freeing the stage
from its slavery to expensive scene setting, and a forest of stiff
conventional trees against a gilt sky still remains with us as a
reminder of an attempt not wholly unsuccessful, in this direction.
This group of Hull-House artists have filled our little foyer
with a series of charming playbills and by dint of painting their
own scenery and making their own costumes have obtained beguiling
results in stage setting. Sometimes all the artistic resources
of the House unite in a Wagnerian combination; thus, the text of
the "Troll's Holiday" was written by one resident, set to music
by another; sung by the Music School, and placed upon the stage
under the careful direction and training of the dramatic
committee; and the little brown trolls could never have tumbled
about so gracefully in their gleaming caves unless they had been
taught in the gymnasium.
Some such synthesis takes place every year at the Hull-House
annual exhibition, when an effort is made to bring together in a
spirit of holiday the nine thousand people who come to the House
every week during duller times. Curiously enough the central
feature at the annual exhibition seems to be the brass band of
the boys' club which apparently dominates the situation by sheer
size and noise, but perhaps their fresh boyish enthusiasm
expresses that which the older people take more soberly.
As the stage of our little theater had attempted to portray the
heroes of many lands, so we planned one early spring seven years
ago, to carry out a scheme of mural decoration upon the walls of
the theater itself, which should portray those cosmopolitan heroes
who have become great through identification with the common lot,
in preference to the heroes of mere achievement. In addition to
the group of artists living at Hull-House several others were in
temporary residence, and they all threw themselves
enthusiastically into the plan. The series began with Tolstoy
plowing his field which was painted by an artist of the Glasgow
school, and the next was of the young Lincoln pushing his flatboat
down the Mississippi River at the moment he received his first
impression of the "great iniquity." This was done by a promising
young artist of Chicago, and the wall spaces nearest to the two
selected heroes were quickly filled with their immortal sayings.
A spirited discussion thereupon ensued in regard to the heroes for
the two remaining large wall spaces, when to the surprise of all of
us the group of twenty-five residents who had lived in unbroken
harmony for more than ten years, suddenly broke up into cults and
even camps of hero worship. Each cult exhibited drawings of its
own hero in his most heroic moment, and of course each drawing
received enthusiastic backing from the neighborhood, each according
to the nationality of the hero. Thus Phidias standing high on his
scaffold as he finished the heroic head of Athene; the young David
dreamily playing his harp as he tended his father's sheep at
Bethlehem; St. Francis washing the feet of the leper; the young
slave Patrick guiding his master through the bogs of Ireland, which
he later rid of their dangers; the poet Hans Sachs cobbling shoes;
Jeanne d'Arc dropping her spindle in startled wonder before the
heavenly visitants, naturally all obtained such enthusiastic
following from our cosmopolitan neighborhood that it was certain to
give offense if any two were selected. Then there was the cult of
residents who wished to keep the series contemporaneous with the
two heroes already painted, and they advocated William Morris at
his loom, Walt Whitman tramping the open road, Pasteur in his
laboratory, or Florence Nightingale seeking the wounded on the
field of battle. But beyond the socialists, few of the neighbors
had heard of William Morris, and the fame of Walt Whitman was still
more apocryphal; Pasteur was considered merely a clever scientist
without the romance which evokes popular affection and in the
provisional drawing submitted for votes, gentle Florence
Nightingale was said "to look more as if she were robbing the dead
than succoring the wounded." The remark shows how high the feeling
ran, and then, as something must be done quickly, we tried to unite
upon strictly local heroes such as the famous fire marshal who had
lived for many years in our neighborhood-- but why prolong this
description which demonstrates once more that art, if not always
the handmaid of religion, yet insists upon serving those deeper
sentiments for which we unexpectedly find ourselves ready to fight.
When we were all fatigued and hopeless of compromise, we took
refuge in a series of landscapes connected with our two heroes by a
quotation from Wordsworth slightly distorted to meet our dire need,
but still stating his impassioned belief in the efficacious spirit
capable of companionship with man which resides in "particular
spots." Certainly peace emanates from the particular folding of the
hills in one of our treasured mural landscapes, yet occasionally
when a guest with a bewildered air looks from one side of the
theater to the other, we are forced to conclude that the connection
is not convincing.
In spite of its stormy career this attempt at mural decoration
connects itself quite naturally with the spirit of our earlier
efforts to make Hull-House as beautiful as we could, which had in
it a desire to embody in the outward aspect of the House something
of the reminiscence and aspiration of the neighborhood life.
As the House enlarged for new needs and mellowed through
slow-growing associations, we endeavored to fashion it from
without, as it were, as well as from within. A tiny wall fountain
modeled in classic pattern, for us penetrates into the world of
the past, but for the Italian immigrant it may defy distance and
barriers as he dimly responds to that typical beauty in which
Italy has ever written its message, even as classic art knew no
region of the gods which was not also sensuous, and as the art of
Dante mysteriously blended the material and the spiritual.
Perhaps the early devotion of the Hull-House residents to the
pre-Raphaelites recognized that they above all English speaking
poets and painters reveal "the sense of the expressiveness of outward
things" which is at once the glory and the limitation of the arts.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK
Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text
entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of
volunteer Andrea Jeddi.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XVII: Echoes of the Russian Revolution." by Jane Addams
(1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by
Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.
400-426.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]