MYSELF, WHEN YOUNG
I have deeply considered the question as to how far and how deep I
should go in the matter of my experiences as an Art student. Those brief
but intense visits to Paris come back to me as almost the best times
that life has given me. To be young, and very ardent, and to achieve
what you have most desired, and to find that it brings full measure and
running over--all those privileges were mine. I may have taken my hand
from the plough, and tried to “_cultiver mon jardin_” in other of the
fields of Paradise, but if I did indeed loose my hand from its first
grasp, it was to place it in another, in the hand of the best comrade,
and the gayest playboy, and the faithfullest friend, that ever came to
turn labour to pastime, and life into a song.
I believe that those who have been Art students themselves will
sympathise with my recollections, and I trust that those who were not
will tolerate them. If neither of these expectations is fulfilled, this
chapter can be lightly skipped. The damage done on either side will be
inconsiderable.
Drawing and riding seem to me to go farther back into my consciousness
than any other of the facts of life. I cannot remember a time when I had
not a pony and a pencil. I adored both about equally, and if I cannot,
even now, draw a horse as I should wish to do it--a fact of which I am
but too well aware--it is not for want of beginning early and trying
often.
My education in Art has been somewhat spasmodic. I think I was about
seventeen when a dazzling invitation came for me from a very much loved
aunt who was also my godmother, to stay with her in London and to work
for a term at the South Kensington School of Art. There followed three
months of a most useful breaking-in for a rather headstrong and unbroken
colt. I do not know what the present curriculum of South Kensington may
be; I know what it was then. From a lawless life of caricaturing my
brethren, my governesses, my clergy, my elders and betters generally,
copying in pen and ink all the hunting pictures, from John Leech to
Georgina Bowers, that old and new “Punches” had to offer, and painting
such landscapes in water colours as would have induced the outraged
earth to open its mouth and swallow up me and all my house, had it but
seen them, I passed to a rule of iron discipline.
1. Decoration, scrolls and ornament in all moods and tenses.
2. The meticulous study in outline of casts of detached portions of the
human frame, noses, ears, hands, feet; and
3. The most heart-breaking and time-wasting stippling of the same.
I well remember how, on a day that I was toiling at a large and knubbly
foot, a full-rigged Mamma came sailing round the class, with a daughter
in tow. The other students were occupied with scrolls and apples and the
like. The Mamma shed gracious sanction as she passed. Then came my turn.
I was aware of a pause, a shock of disapproval, and then the words,
“A _naked_ foot, my dear!”
There was a tug on the tow-rope and the daughter was removed.
I imagine it must have been near the end of my three months that my
detested efforts were made into a bundle and sent up to high places with
a scribble on the margin of one of them, “May Miss Somerville pass for
the Antique? E. Miller.”
In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and
terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red
beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence
after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was
permitted to Pass for the Antique.
This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep
regret for all of her London sojourn that did _not_ include the School
of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and
to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an
instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of
the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and
was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on
board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in
hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (_i.e._ the
entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward.
“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder,
with the licence of old acquaintance and authority.
My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself
to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the
steward could learn, and much that he could teach.
“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye
have an hour yet.”
Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my
own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and
corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters æsthetic
beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been
my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to
Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and
marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that
heavy-earned Pass for the Antique.
My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five
years, and was spent in Düsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my
brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and
advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first
dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet,
then himself a student, now a well-known and successful
portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing
lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my
professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I
think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in
Düsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back
to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance
of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very
much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more
than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends
whom Providence had considerately sent to Düsseldorf to be kind to me,
in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of
orchestras, and enjoying every note they played, while I covered my
programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do).
My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good
two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the
Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in
Düsseldorf.
The Abbé Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving
through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers
at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye.
I do not regret those two springs in Düsseldorf, but still less do I
regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the
following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart
from other considerations, the Düsseldorf School of Art only admitted
male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of
creation.
Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow
line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing
eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb
in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in Düsseldorf, had
moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared
with the possibilities of work in Düsseldorf, settled the question for
me. But the point was not carried without friction.
“Paris!”
They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially
matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of
thing.
They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said,
“The <small>IDEA</small> of letting a <small>GIRL</small> go to PARIS!”
This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters”
(they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was
frightened.
So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard,
consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us
another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in Düsseldorf. We went
to a _pension_ in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and
hope, exists no more.
As I think of its gloomy and hideous _salons_, its atmosphere of garlic
and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated
draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an
open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages,
dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells
in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with
long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my
fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the
engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m.
But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time
of it.
So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious
sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then
reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave
me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to
endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she
was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as
“your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I
remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and
merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted my
preference, even--as the fight warmed--my adoration, for the practice of
cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother,
who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the
suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation!
Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into
your own good family vault!”)
With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as
much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to
another _pension_, nearly _vis-à-vis_ the Studio. This latter was an
offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the
Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs Elysées) in order to secure English
and American clients, as well as those French _jeunes filles bien
élevées_ to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not
commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “_très
bien élevées_’ and “_très gentilles_,” and in recognition of this, a
sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female,
who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with _les élèves_
over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all
who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C----,
fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The
class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M.
Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected
were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C---- was accustomed to appeal to
me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about _La fille de
Jephté_, and explained that the Bible was a book not _convenable pour
les jeunes filles_, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most
interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without
approaching Martin’s Sunday School erudition, I presently found myself
established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week,
when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German
came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to
ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?”
Mlle. la C----’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the
Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to
its name. None the less, a _bonne_ came daily at 12 o’clock to escort
her home for _déjeuner_. There came a day when the _bonne_ failed of her
mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who
was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with
hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family
to return alone.
One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies
herself to this extent.
In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend
May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very
delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old
French noble descent, allowed me to join their _ménage_. Its duties were
divided according to our capacities. Marion A---- was housekeeper,
“Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was
allotted the humble _rôle_ of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and
filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and
narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they
must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed
of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any
creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and
Ponce and I had decided to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to
what was known there as “_le Colarossi là-bas_,” the real, serious,
professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “_près
l’Étoile_”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed.
I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my
fellows were usually given--like the Prodigal Son--a portion, a sum of
money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased,
but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back
upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should
have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food
between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in
London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.)
Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies
were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the
most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid
seven francs per week for my bedroom and _service_, and though this may
not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation
was dear at the money. My room, _au cinquième_, had a tiled floor, but
this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the
affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position
on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my
breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected
with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft,
full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of
its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did
it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid
screeches of the violin--(to which latter I contributed a not unworthy
share)--and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist.
The _service_ (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc)
consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose
professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our
hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He
reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any
task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally
evoke hot water. Marion A----, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame,
a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer
Léon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of
Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind
his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so
far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so
much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the
least.
Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured
old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow
acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande
Chaumière. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some
rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the
promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils,
and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises
sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked
was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious,
external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor
beneath us. “_Le Colarossi là-bas_” was indisputably serious. The models
were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick of the trade
could hope to pass undetected by “_Le Patron_”; the students were there
to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios
were all crowded with “_les sérieux_.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale,
pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois--“_Le beau Gustave_”--tall
and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like
two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They
were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were
feared. They went their rounds with--as it were--scythe blades on their
chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking
to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “_les hommes en bas_” cease
in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know
that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary
how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our
stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to
make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the
study, that was “_pas assez bien construit_,” looking with its savage
corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly
one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black
coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be
performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to
“_le beau Gustave_” that one _élève_ was spared from the fire and sword
to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient
widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was
eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was
soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two
years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came, regarded
with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described,
in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself,
faltered “_Continuez, Madame_,” and hurried on. Despite this
encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for
on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more.
When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many
Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the
Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that
properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put
the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again;
they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and _Finlandaises_;
there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her
manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little
Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia
(with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised,
determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of
value from their _abonnements_ (and, incidentally, also to extract from
any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, _punaises_, etc., as
they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of
detection.)
The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who
looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have
said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and
fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five
sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and
carry them back to the _ménage_ wrapped in a piece of _La Patrie_, until
Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were
fried in the fat of lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the
murderer.)
Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days,
the studios were open, and there were _élèves_ at work. Impossible to
imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated
savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had
been sacrificed.
Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its
intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one
Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find
myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming
up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a
_Carton_ as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other.
[Illustration: DANS LA RIVE GAUCHE.]