He was growing up. Shy he would always be, but in place of his boyish
self-distrust had come a quiet confidence in his own powers. His mind
was on the watch for its food, like an eagle ready to pounce. There
was an eager, vigilant look in his eyes when one spoke of certain
books unknown to him: he was questioning whether they would be what he
wanted. He would pump me about the content of certain authors. I could
see him accepting and rejecting. He read the poets as one quarrying
marble for architectural designs of his own. His hungry reading was as
different from that of the perfunctory college student as the
oarsmanship of a dory fisherman on the Grand Banks is from that of an
eight-oared crew on the placid Charles: the producer as contrasted
with the consumer.
George Meredith and Walt Whitman became two of his great companions.
Once he told me that he was reading everything of Thomas Hardy he
could lay his hands on.
"Why?" I asked.
"He knows how to set the human figure against vast backgrounds of
Nature: figures outlined half against a heath and half against sky."
I wonder if Romain Rolland realizes the intimacy of the friendship
which has sprung up between _Jean-Christophe_ and the youth of to-day.
Fritz and Christophe took an amazing shine to each other from the
start. It was _Christophe_ who led Fritz to read everything else of
Romain Rolland he could find, and thus his steps were guided to the
summit of that Mount of Vision, Rolland's _Life of Tolstoy_, whence he
looked far and wide into the stern grandeur of that moral wilderness
unsubdued by man through which the heroic thinker and prophet pushes
on alone.... To look is to follow. He began to devour Tolstoy's works.
_The Kreutzer Sonata_ he sat up half the night beside my fire to
finish. Waking towards morning I saw him scowling over it. He asked to
take the book away with him. Soon he was up to his neck in the
dramatists: Ibsen, Strindberg, Brieux, Sudermann, Galsworthy, Synge,
Shaw.
There was a performance of _Candida_ with Mr. Milton Rosmer as the
poet. They say that a secret can be told only to him who knows it
already. There is a secret in two tremendous speeches at the close of
that play which (as the dramatist himself says) few but poets know:
MORELL: (_alarmed_) Candida: don't let him do anything rash.
CANDIDA: (_confident, smiling at Eugene_) Oh, there is no fear.
He has learnt to live without happiness.
MARCHBANKS: I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than
that. Parson James, I give you my happiness with both hands.
Those lines stung Fritz as the whip stings a mettled horse. His flesh
rebelled, but the poet in him leaped to the truth.
On March 20, 1913, the colony at 94 Charles Street adjourned to a
performance of _Man and Superman_. Fritz kept his room-mate up until
two in the morning discussing it. The next night he routed me out of
bed at ten and quizzed me about it until three in the morning.
He had had his glimpse of the collision between sex and ambition;
between the impulse of the woman to create children of flesh and
blood, with the man as adjunct and provider; and the impulse of the
man to create children of the spirit independently of the woman. He
was quick to realize that he had struck something which he had to
settle, and he was settling it. The thing was deliciously transparent.
Here was a young gentleman tremendously in earnest about being an
artist. Being an artist he loved beauty. Hitherto, in his shy way, he
had secretly been rather tickled by the flutter which his striking
head created in the dove cots of pretty girls. But after March 20,
1913, the tune changed. He was affable, delighted to make their
acquaintance--but on his guard. He had not the slightest intention of
letting sex thwart his ambition.
"Yes, but...?"
"Yes, but...." He played the game. A commercial society decrees that
the artist cannot have a livelihood until his work is accepted at a
commercial value. Pending that acceptance, if he assumes the
responsibility of wife and children he also assumes the risk of
shackling himself to pot-boiling work for life.
Society also decrees a standard of prenuptial chastity for the male.
Suppose the male happens to be more interested in art than in
domesticity. He must then ask himself whether he shall abide by a
decree which bourgeois society promulgates with more emphasis than
sincerity. With his eyes wide open to the fact that the very society
which promulgates this decree openly winks at its evasion, Fritz abode
by it. A slightly sterner set to his jaw; a slightly darker flash in
his eye; a slightly grimmer stoicism in the grip on his emotions were
all that betrayed the battle which had raged in him between the two
creative forces: sex and intellect. He never pretended that the battle
was won for keeps. The crust on which he walked he knew to be thin.
But it was won for the present. He well knew that there are no bargain
days at life's counter: he had come there to purchase one of the most
precious commodities--a creative career--and he was willing to pay the
fee. If he found the fee somewhat high (and I have reason to know that
he did) he never complained. It was his reward to enjoy that supreme
luxury of conduct--to be the thing he seemed. He lived in that kind of
glass house which is not damaged by any amount of stone-throwing,
because there is nothing to hit: a glass house with all the curtains
up. "Naked and unashamed" could have been written over the door of his
mind. Time and again he quoted a passage from _Trilby_ in which Du
Maurier says that mental chastity begins in the artist when the model
drops her last garment. He was frank to add that this was strictly
true; that in the intense concentration of his mind on problems of
form and color he had found in painting from the nude no room for
images of sex but on the contrary an actual release from the heats and
fevers which plague young men. The remedy he proposed was: "Get rid of
mystery."
There is a portrait painted at about this time which tells the story
of the inner struggle which he was fighting and winning. It is of a
young girl, about his own age, with a wondrously sweet expression and
sparkling eyes. The delicacy, the spirituality which shines through it
makes it hard to believe that the portrait could have been painted by
a young man. Not a hint of sexuality. He later told me that the girl
was afflicted with a lameness and he told how grateful he was to her
for valuing him for his mind and not obtruding sex. I doubt if he knew
how publicly yet with what delicacy he had thanked her.
There were moods of him, as when he stood silently drinking in a
landscape, which made me think of that fine old chant which one hears
in the churches:
"O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."
* * * * *
In the emptiness left by his death I came to realize that one of the
principal anticipations of my life had been looking forward to watch,
year by year, the unfolding of his mind and the ripening of his
powers. His talent had long since passed the stage at which it was a
sporting proposition--the stage at which one could chaff him about
cashing in heavily some day on a pair of "early Demmlers."
There was no kind of doubt that he carried within him the creative
"daimon." His very instincts betrayed it. He went at a landscape the
way Hugo Wolf went at a song: he lived with the poem before creating
the music. For the first few days in a novel countryside he never
thought of touching brush to canvas. He walked around in the scene,
his every sense alert to its feature and color, to its sound and
smell. He laid in wait for its moods. He eyed it in every circumstance
of wind and weather, as if it had been a face he was preparing to
paint, or a woman he was preparing to wed. No words. The quality he
most appreciated in a companion at such times was silence. And it was
entertainment enough to watch the play of expression in his face as
his eyes roamed meadow, hill or sea horizon--vigilance, delight,
eagerness, discriminating study, instructions to memory, brooding
thought--his life was a perpetual honeymoon with nature for his bride.
Then would come the day and the hour when he was ready to paint. By
that time, in the wealth of his materials, his only study would be not
what to put in but what to leave out. I doubt if he had reached the
point of knowingly causing his subconscious to work for him, but it
will be apparent from the foregoing that he was doing so
unconsciously.
He was able, somehow, to communicate his sense of form and color to
another, without resort to speech, or with only the fewest words.
Perhaps it was the stimulus of seeing how much there was for him in
the distant shining of sunlight on winding waters, or a range of low
hills scrawling their signature on the chill blue of horizon sky,
which taught others to find the wonder and dignity in what they would
once have looked on as commonplace. At any rate, I find myself, in all
seasons, seeing landscapes through his eyes.... "Now that looks
commonplace, but it isn't. Fritz would have seen something in these
somber March-brown meadows drowned in the freshets of spring; these
red-budding birches; this delicate flush of pink in a drab evening
sky...." And so he, being dead, yet seeth.
He was well aware, by this time, that the artist who is not also a
thinker is a one-legged man. He accepted the obligation of
understanding matters which, superficially, might have seemed far
outside his province. It was in 1915 that he encountered Tolstoy's
great work on Christian anarchism, _The Kingdom of God Is Within You_.
It revolutionized his view of life. It convinced him of the futility
of violence as a method of settling disputes, personal or national.
And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of
having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a
world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his
own right.
Next he encountered Romain Rolland's _Life of Michael Angelo_. Far
from being chilled by the classic austerity of that work, it warmed
him. In it he found the food he had been seeking. He made it a part of
him. It confirmed, with revelations of the laws of mental conduct
which governed that giant of the Renaissance, principles which this
young man had been formulating and practising by the naked instinct of
his will to create. Things which he had been doing or forbearing to
do, he could not have told you why, here received their sanction or
veto in the experience of a genius.
Little as was said about this between us, it was easy to see how
profoundly this discovery of the similarity between his own mental
processes and those of a great master had strengthened his confidence
in himself. Michael Angelo was added to the list of his Great
Companions.
He had another. Rembrandt.
There was a gallery in London, which one I forget, which he visited
day after day.
"In the first room you entered," said he, "was a portrait of an old
woman by Rembrandt, painted in his last period. Time after time I went
there intending to see the rest of the gallery. Sometimes I even tried
a room or two. What was the use? I went back to that portrait. It
seemed like a waste of time to look at the other pictures. Everything
they said--if they said anything--was said in that portrait by
Rembrandt and said better. It seemed to me as if the whole history of
humanity were concentrated in that old woman's face.... Finally I
surrendered and went only to see that."
* * * * *
There is a chastity of the mind, just as there is a chastity of the
body. There are certain creative processes which a sincere thinker
would no more reveal to casual eyes than he would strip in a public
place. A rule of mental chastity: Do not hold promiscuous mental
intercourse. The shallow would intrude into these austere places like
picnickers in a sanctuary, littering it with their luncheon refuse.
Let the artist raise his thought-stained face from his toil, smiling
but mute.
Fritz guarded his secrets well. A sudden flash of arrested eye, a
certain silent intentness of gaze, an interest in a subject which
would seem altogether out of proportion to its importance, a look of
perpetual expectancy were all that betrayed his search. He was
learning, learning, learning: every hour, every minute. Sometimes for
days together he would seem dormant--practical people would have said
loafing--lazily absorbing impressions as it had been through his
pores. Again he seemed to devour scenery, faces, books, ideas with an
appetite that was insatiable.
A young sculptor, meeting Fritz, observed to me privately,
"What an unromantic exterior for an artist!"
The joke was too good to tell Fritz for, all innocently on
the sculptor's part, it revealed a secret which I was not
supposed to know: that Fritz instinctively cultivated this
young-man-just-out-of-college-and-doing-well-in-business exterior as a
high board fence behind which, free from intrusion, to train the
muscles of his mind and cultivate the golden orchards of his soul.
He had to. For once he had mastered the tools of his trade there was
absolutely no one to teach him the things he most needed to know. He
must go it alone. He knew it. And he was going. That was the secret of
the watchful, hungry look of him--the look of one aware of a ravenous
appetite and never sure of his next meal. That was the secret of his
inarticulate gratitude to anyone who happened to be able to put him in
the way of finding the food his spirit craved. He discovered that the
composers knew more about painting than most painters, and he used to
turn up at Symphony concerts or at the opera with the look of a small
boy fresh from a session with the jam pot behind the pantry door. He
wasn't saying anything, but you knew that he'd got it. He made a
bee-line for Beethoven and Wagner. He came away after a performance of
_Tristan_ most divinely drunk on the strongest wine in music.
For the method of these composers was the method which he had chosen
for himself unconsciously. He was not satisfied to write a thin
melody. He was determined to teach his brush the rich and complicated
instrumentation of an orchestral score. Not this face or that
landscape was what he planned to put on canvas, but the abundance of
life which he had absorbed through every avenue of sense. Not a
violin alone, nothing less than the full orchestra would content him.
I ask myself whether I shall ever see anything more inspiriting than
the quiet, secret quest of this young man for an excellence and a
mastery not only unrecognized and unrewarded by the social order in
which he lived, but not even comprehended. This is the courage of the
creative mind: that it is prepared to meet alike its triumph or its
defeat in an utter moral solitude. Stories of the physical courage
which Fritz displayed on the field of battle were to come later....
Which is likely to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on earth more
speedily--the courage of the body, to destroy; or the courage of the
mind, to create?
Is all this too eulogistic? "Oh, come! He must have had faults,
weaknesses, common spots." ... I suppose so. To tell the truth I never
noticed them. There was a trait, as I first remember him, of too ready
assent to the opinions of others which it amused me to attribute to
peasant ancestry; but, after all, that conformity was only outward and
it soon disappeared. In matters really vital to him his will was
granite and he commanded a silence which could vociferate "Hands off!"
His very inarticulate tongue gave promise of greatness. One saw all
this life-stuff entering into him. He could never express it in
speech. It was a necessity of his being to express it somehow. It
would have to come out on canvas.
Oh, once in a great while the curtain would be dropped. Some lucky
turn of conversation would relax the inhibitions and liberate his
tongue. Then for a few minutes, perhaps for an hour, one would be
shown the treasure house within. What shall I say of those glimpses?
There are times to walk fearfully lest one smash something which
cannot be replaced, and these occasions were of them. Treasures not of
this world; possessions which honored the possessor by being held in
honor; bins heaped, as it had been, with jewels and brocades; others
which gaped with a sacrificial emptiness; spaces eked out with the
heroic poverty of one dedicated to the monasticism of a creative
career.
Enough.... I saw--what I saw.
* * * * *
And withal he was half pagan. The physical gratification with which he
drank in the beauty of the world reminded me of that statuette by
_Roderick Hudson_, Dipsos ("Thirst")--a boy, feet planted
wide apart, head thrown back, slaking his throat out of a gourd held
in both hands. Fritz was that boy. The ugliness of modern clothes
disgusted him. He was alert for chances to take off his own: impromptu
baths in cold brooks on walking trips, or long days of summer sunshine
on lonely stretches of sea beach with gleaming yellow sands. There was
some place among the mountains of West Virginia where he used to go:
ledges of flat rock above a rushing river. All day long they gathered
warmth from the sun, retaining it well into the night. When the moon
had risen he loved to steal away for a plunge in the river, then lie
out naked in the moonlight on these great slabs of warm rock, alone
with the magic night.