Julian Paul Goetze died December 21st, 1885. This event removed the
final reason for concealment of that strange story whose dark reality
flung a shadow about his later years.
At his death Goetze was in his thirty-fifth year, and for more than a
decade previous had been considered one of the foremost portrait
painters of the younger school. I knew him intimately--was a frequent
visitor at his studio, and, I believe, the only confidant he was ever
known to have.
As I recall those years there is an unreality about them that I am
unable to dispel. The problems discussed--the theories maintained of
life, death, art, poetry, and any number of other unfathomed subjects,
appear to me now so preternatural--the conceptions of his wonderful
brain so startling, that I can hardly realize having ever been a part,
even though but a faint reflex, of that dazzling and unsated life.
In appearance he was no less remarkable. His figure was rather slight
than otherwise, and of medium height. His features, though greatly
modified, were distinctly those of the American Indian. High cheek
bones, slightly aquiline nose, dark olive skin. His eyes and hair were a
blue black. You would hardly have called him handsome, but there was
something in that fiercely intense face, in the lithe grace of movement,
in the small and exquisitely shaped hands and feet, that made him a
fascinating, if not a dangerous, companion for the other sex. All of
these had been bequeathed him by his mother, in whose veins ran the
French and Indian blood in equal parts. From his father, a fair-haired
German, he had inherited only his name.
His nature was a strange blending of opposing forces, forever at civil
war and each swaying him in turn. He had few friends, but those few
adored him for his splendid genius and prodigal generosity, pitying his
darker side.
When, as not unfrequently happened, he locked his studio and plunged for
days into abject depravity, they sought him out and led him back to his
better self. After the culmination of that singular affair narrated in
these papers, and for which he doubtless felt himself greatly to blame,
these lapses became more and more frequent and protracted. The facts
which I have collected relating to this period of his life were many of
them gathered bit by bit as the events occurred, and later from brief
interviews during temporary periods of consciousness just prior to his
death.
It was in one of these that he apprised me of the existence of certain
private papers, the contents of which would make the chain of
circumstances complete. Then the fires that had blazed forever within
him burned out his life.
H. L.
ST. LOUIS, NOV. 4th, 1890.
NOTE BY THE AUTHOR.--The above, accompanied by a manuscript
roll of considerable size, a crumpled, and yellow letter
torn in halves, and a number of loose pages covered with
peculiar writing (unsigned, though evidently the work of the
unhappy artist) lie before me. It is with hesitating and
unsteady hands that I separate these silent voices of the
past, and gather them at last together into a living though
unworthy echo of my own.