In the autumn he reappeared bronzed and husky from a summer on a
Pennsylvania farm. That spring had been the overture. Now the curtain
rose. How can my thin piano score reproduce that richly glowing
orchestration?
Gradually the artist in him unfolded. It was like a process of
nature--slow, silent, sure. In speech he was inarticulate. The spoken
word was not his trade; he knew it, and the knowledge made him
self-conscious. But give him a brush and he found tongue. His silences
were formidable. "The better to eat you with, my dear!" Nothing
escaped him. With a secret, fierce impetuosity he was storing away
impressions: glances, gestures, lines of faces, colors, inflections of
voices, landscapes, phrases, incidents, ideas: he soaked them in like
a thirsty sponge. Everything was fish that came to his net. What
sometimes looked like an intellectual torpor was the boa constrictor
digesting the zebra whole. I doubt if he realized the tremendous
vitality of his creative instinct. He went about it as a wild creature
roams the forest for its food: it was a law of his being. On tramping
trips he would stalk miles in silence; stopping stock still until he
had taken in the scarlet-and-gold maple grove in a purple autumn mist;
or a mossy wood pile under pines; or the rolling diversity of hill and
woodland. No apologies; no explanations. Business.
It was soon clear that this young man knew exactly what he wanted and
that he intended to get it. There was a kind of animal sagacity about
his mind which told it what food to accept and what to reject.
"_Kuenstler_," says Goethe, "_rede nicht. Bilde!_" (Artist, don't talk.
Create!) Fritz lived this precept. He would do first, and then let the
doing speak for itself. When a young man is so determined to do
something that he cannot be got to talk about it, you may consider the
thing as good as done. Here was a hungry mind, seeking what it might
devour and devouring it. All that provender was being assimilated. It
could not evaporate in talk, for Fritz was no talker. It had to be
expressed somehow and that somehow would have to be with a brush....
Oh, he came and went disguised in the business suit of a young man
dedicated to the career of buying in the cheapest market and selling
in the dearest: pleasant, friendly, a prodigious eater, a sound
sleeper, invincibly healthy,--and with only that silent intentness of
eye to betray the secret of the creative power he carried within him.
But that winter it was surprised out of him.
Fred Middleton, then twenty-seven years old, six years out of Harvard
College, thoroughly conversant with the ethics of modern business, was
preparing to _de_-class himself and earn an honest living by manual
labor on the land--a farmer, and not a "gentleman farmer." With mock
solemnity Fritz was commissioned to do a portrait of Fred. The
transaction was conducted on a basis of "free agreement" which would
have satisfied even Peter Kropotkin. The painter was to do it any way
he chose--absolute free speech. The sitter was to choose any clothes
he liked, to sit till he was tired, and stretch when he pleased. The
purchaser was to pay what he was able. So everybody was happy, being
free.
In the third floor back on Pinckney Street (it had north light) decks
were cleared for action: two rickety orange boxes covered with a
steamer rug did duty as a dais. With paint box, easel and palette
Fritz came down from Exeter where he had just finished a portrait of
an old lady.
There was a glowing fire in the grate; a bluster of March winds in the
brick court; the roar of blast through the antlers of the old linden;
waning light of Saturday and Sunday afternoons; pages of Nietzsche's
epigrams and of _Jean-Christophe_ read aloud; pauses to rest and
consult.
Fritz always noticed people's hands. He found almost as much character
in them as in faces. He admired the hands in Rodin's work, especially
that of the sculptor in his _Pygmalion_:--"the tenderness of that
hand!" he said. Fred's large hands interested him. The right one he
caught hot off the bat. The left caused him no end of trouble. Finally
one day he threw down his brush and exclaimed:
"I've watched that left hand come down to rest on that leg a dozen
times. I've tried everything else and now I'm going to paint it
exactly as it is. After all, it _is_ a hand."
"_Thank_ you; _thank_ you!" replied Fred, bowing suavely. "People
usually refer to it as a ham. A photographer once told me that I had a
mitt like an elephant's hoof."
* * * * *
And Fritz painted. And the secret was out. It came out in two
installments: the first, when he was spreading on canvas a life
history of Fred Middleton compressed into terms of a rugged face and
two large hands; the second came three years later. Fred had remarked,
after one of his sittings, that it was all he could do to keep his
face straight at some of the grimaces Fritz made while painting. The
precaution was needless. If he had laughed outright it is doubtful if
Fritz would have noticed it.
Most of the time while he was painting the portrait of me, three years
later, I was absorbed in my own work and paid no attention to him. But
one afternoon when my wheels refused to grind I took a holiday and
watched him out of the tail of my eye....
It was as if some one you supposed you knew all about had removed a
set of false whiskers and spoken in his natural voice. Was this our
shy, silent Fritz? Why, the impudence of him! The shameless way he
peered into the secret places of a face! "See here, young gentleman,
who gave you permission to rummage through that trunkful of old
letters?"
Here at last was Fritz, on his native heath, naked and unashamed,
talking his own language and, confident of its not being understood,
indulging in the most appalling candor.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While he pried
into my secrets I pried into his. I amused myself by painting a
portrait of Fritz painting. Some day I meant to show it to him.... But
here it is:
"He may not be able to talk with his tongue. But give him his brushes
and his whole body talks. No gymnastics: but his whole being aquiver.
Silent, but his arms, fingers, head, shoulders make animated dumb
show. He is conversing delightedly with himself over his work. He has
forgotten time and place. Intense mental concentration, and nervous
energy. He squints, grimaces, stoops and looks at his canvas
wrong-side up. He sets his teeth, compresses lips, squares his
shoulders,--lost in his work. He mixes colors with minute
particularity. Sometimes he dabs with a tiny brush, a peek here, a
peck there, like a dainty bird. Again he paints in sweeping
flourishes, beating a kind of rapturous rhythm with his brush,
gesturing with it between strokes, like an orchestral conductor hewing
out the rhythms of a symphony.... He pauses; he hangs limp over his
palette, considering.... Or he gives a joyous little bounce in his
chair as the decision comes. His hands and forearms, strong and
supple, talk in every sinew. Fingers mobile, infinitely expressive:
they thumb the brush; turn its handle in a ruminating pause; reflect a
sudden resolution in the stiffening of tendons....
"And above all this quiet animation and silent dexterity is the
regnant, gallant head with dark eyes flashing mastery; the mouth set
with purpose; the thick mass of shining black hair breaking into a
wave as it falls away from the clear forehead--and all in complete
self-forgetfulness, the oblivion of the artist rapt in the joy of
creating."
It was quite simple. Here was a soul which dwelt in a prison of
shyness. Painting unlocked the door. Out it rushed. Free. It could be
itself at last. No fears; no concealments. Liberty!
That was all very well for Fritz, but how about his sitter? About the
time the sitter sensed what was going on he felt moved to exclaim:
"Just a moment, Fritz. Don't you think you are getting a trifle
familiar?"
I heard one of his painter friends, eyeing a canvas which Fritz had
just finished, mutter,
"There is some marvelous subtlety about that mind."
Already his knack of guessing people was damnable. He played no
favorites. "I am going to paint what I see or I am not going to paint
at all." If what he saw was fatuous, he told it with the disconcerting
gusto of a child; if it was sad, he told it (as in that student
portrait) so as to produce a burning pressure behind the eyelids; if
it was strong and gentle, he told it (as in the portrait of the young
farmer) so as to kindle respect and affection. Often all this was
unconscious. Again he knew exactly what he was doing and took a wicked
relish in it. Of some wealthies whom he was painting he confided with
a grin:
"Of course they patronize me within an inch of my life, but I
sometimes wonder what would happen if they knew...."
Perhaps he was not so unsophisticated as advertised in the catalogue.
He helped himself pretty generously out of the popular supposition
that an artist is a mild form of lunatic. He made good use of his
talent for silence. But what ears and eyes! Nobody who had seen him
paint could ever feel quite safe with him again.
V
It happened that Alexander James was studying at the Museum School.
That the son of "the psychologist who made psychology read like a
novel" and the nephew of "the novelist who made a novel read like
psychology" should have identified Fritz's talent the first crack out
of the box was about the least surprising thing in the world. The two
young painters proceeded to form an offensive and defensive alliance.
Where one was, there was the other also; on the baseball field, on
painting expeditions, on pilgrimages in early spring into New
Hampshire to climb Chocorua, and on occasional voyages into the land
of pretty girls. It was good to see the pair together: two
thoroughbreds. Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other fair,
both about the same height and build. People would turn to look after
them as they passed with an expression of "Wonder who they are.
Somebody out of the ordinary."
Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration of Fritz behind a
smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would suffer with an amused grin
and the massive calm of a mastiff, for he had no such arsenal of
repartee as this young gentleman from the household of a Harvard
professor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as to
set Alexander spinning. It did not take the Cambridge youth long to
discover the use Fritz made of his talent for silence and it was his
delight to give him away in his game of holding his tongue the better
to use his eyes,--as Alexander said: "the wise old Bruin!"
* * * * *
In Massachusetts the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, April 19,
is a holiday. It was 1913. In the parlor of an inn whose windows look
northward across the snug haven of Rockport to the surf-scoured ledges
of Pigeon Cove I was seated at a piano, back to the door, painfully
dissecting a score of _Tristan_.