Ludlow believed that if the right fellow ever came to the work, he
could get as much pathos out of our farm folks as Millet got out of his
Barbizon peasants. But the fact was that he was not the fellow; he
wanted to paint beauty not pathos; and he thought, so far as he thought
ethically about it, that, the Americans needed to be shown the festive
and joyous aspects of their common life. To discover and to represent
these was his pleasure as an artist, and his duty as a citizen. He
suspected, though, that the trotting-match was the only fact of the
Pymantoning County Fair that could be persuaded to lend itself to his
purpose. Certainly, there was nothing in the fair-house, with those
poor, dreary old people straggling through it, to gladden an artistic
conception. Agricultural implements do not group effectively, or pose
singly with much picturesqueness; tall stalks of corn, mammoth
squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that
belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections
of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a
wooden floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very
bacchanal profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long
tables and ticketed with the names of their varieties and exhibitors.
Ludlow glanced at them, to right and left, as he walked through the
long, barn-like building, and took in with other glances the inadequate
decorations of the graceless interior. His roving eye caught the
lettering over the lateral archways, and with a sort of contemptuous
compassion he turned into the Fine Arts Department.
The fine arts were mostly represented by photographs and crazy quilts;
but there were also tambourines and round brass plaques painted with
flowers, and little satin banners painted with birds or autumn leaves,
and gilt rolling-pins with vines. There were medley-pictures contrived
of photographs cut out and grouped together in novel and unexpected
relations; and there were set about divers patterns and pretences in
keramics, as the decoration of earthen pots and jars was called.
Besides these were sketches in oil and charcoal, which Ludlow found
worse than the more primitive things, with their second-hand _chic_
picked up in a tenth-rate school. He began to ask himself whether
people tasteless enough to produce these inanities and imagine them
artistic, could form even the subjects of art; he began to have doubts
of his impression of the trotting-match, its value, its possibility of
importance. The senseless ugliness of the things really hurt him: his
worship of beauty was a sort of religion, and their badness was a sort
of blasphemy. He could not laugh at them; he wished he could; and his
first impulse was to turn and escape from the Fine Arts Department, and
keep what little faith in the artistic future of the country he had
been able to get together during his long sojourn out of it. Since his
return he had made sure of the feeling for color and form with which
his country-women dressed themselves. There was no mistake about that;
even here, in the rustic heart of the continent he had seen costumes
which had touch and distinction; and it could not be that the instinct
which they sprang from should go for nothing in the arts supposed
higher than mantua-making and millinery. The village girls whom he saw
so prettily gowned and picturesquely hatted on the benches out there by
the race-course, could it have been they who committed these
atrocities? Or did these come up from yet deeper depths of the country,
where the vague, shallow talk about art going on for the past decade
was having its first crude effect? Ludlow was exasperated as well as
pained, for he knew that the pretty frocks and hats expressed a love of
dressing prettily, which was honest and genuine enough, while the
unhappy effects about him could spring only from a hollow vanity far
lower than a woman's wish to be charming. It was not an innate impulse
which produced them, but a sham ambition, implanted from without, and
artificially stimulated by the false and fleeting mood of the time.
They must really hamper the growth of aesthetic knowledge among people
who were not destitute of the instinct.
He exaggerated the importance of the fact with the sensitiveness of a
man to whom aesthetic cultivation was all-important. It appeared to him
a far greater evil than it was; it was odious to him, like a vice; it
was almost a crime. He spent a very miserable time in the Fine Arts
Department of the Pymantoning County Agricultural Fair; and in a kind
of horrible fascination he began to review the collection in detail, to
guess its causes in severalty and to philosophize its lamentable
consequences.