Villagers
Although the serious affairs of life are met as
conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit
of the Village, nevertheless each of them assuredly shows
less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so
prevalent throughout the land....
The real villager's life is better balanced. He produces
written words of value, or material objects that offer
utility and delight. _He sings his songs. He has a good
time._--From the _Ink Pot_ (a Greenwich Village paper).
I quoted the above to a practical friend and he countered by quoting
Dickens' delightful fraud, "Harold Skimpole":
"This is where the bird lives and sings! They pluck his
feathers now and then, and clip his wings, but he sings, he
sings!... Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!"
And my friend proceeded heartlessly: "'Skimpole' would have made a
perfect Villager!"
It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm
poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the
languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and
the post is not a sinecure.
I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I
love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan
consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal
representatives of interior and unexplored China. They are perhaps
chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.
The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not particularly rare. Many
persons have a real love for beautiful things, even a real aptitude
for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something
vastly different. Creative artists,--great painters or sculptors,
great illustrators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal
effects,--must be both born and made; and there are, the gods know,
few enough of them, all told! Until comparatively recent times,
everyone gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense turned it into
a curse by trying to paint, draw or model, while the world yawned,
laughed, turned away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their
hands to heaven and cried: "What next?"
But lately,--in many places, but preeminently in Greenwich
Village,--these folk who love art, but can't achieve great art
expression, have evolved a new sort of art life. They are developing
the embryo of what was the arts-and-crafts idea into a really fine,
useful and satisfying art form. They have left mission furniture and
Morris designs behind. They are making their own models, and making
them well. They are turning their restless, beauty-loving energies
into sound, constructive channels. The girl who otherwise might have
painted atrocious pictures is, in the Village, decorating
delightful-looking boxes and jars, or hammering metals into quaint,
original shapes that embody her own fleeting fancies. The man who
wanted to draw but could never get his perspective right is carving
wood--a work where perspective is superfluous--and achieving pleasure
for others, and comfort and a livelihood for himself, at one and the
same time.
I know of nothing which is so typical or so significant in all the
Village as this new urge toward good craftsmanship, elementary poetic
design,--the fundamentals of a utilitarian, beautiful and pervading
art life apart from clay or canvas.
The capitol of the Village shifts a bit from time to time, as befits
so flexible, so fluid a community. Just at the present writing, it is
at Sheridan Square that you will find it most colourfully and
picturesquely represented. Tomorrow, no man may be able to say whence
it has flitted.
You will find much golden sunshine in Sheridan Square--not the
approved atmosphere of Bohemia, yet the real thing nevertheless. It is
a broad, clean, brazen sort of sunshine--a sunshine that should say,
"See me work! See me shine! See me show up the least last ugliness or
smallness or humbleness, and glorify it to something Village-like and
picturesque!"
When you leave the sunny square, you will enter the oddest little
court in all New York; it has not to my knowledge any name, but it is
the general address of enough tea shops and studios and Village haunts
to stock an entire neighbourhood. The buildings are old--old, and, of
course, of wood. These artist folk have metamorphosed the shabby and
dilapidated structures into charming places.
Following the sign of deep blue with yellow letters which indicates
that this is the place where the Hand-Painted Wooden Toys are made,
you must climb in the sunshine up the outside staircase, which looks
as though it had been put up for scaffolding purposes and then
forgotten. Pausing on the rickety stairway and looking out beyond the
crazy little court and over the drowsy Square, you will have a great
deal of difficulty in believing that you left your cable car about a
minute and a half before. Pass on up the stairs. You may nearly fall
over the black-and-white feline which belongs to no one in any of the
buildings, but which haunts them all like an unquiet ghost, and which
is known by everyone as the Crazy Cat; so to the door of the
studio-workshop where the toys are made.
[Illustration: PATCHIN PLACE. One of the strange little "lost courts"
given over to the Villagers and their pursuits.]
And have you ever seen anything quite like that workshop?
A little light studio full of colour and the smell of paint. On one
side blue-green boxes stacked on shelves; on the other finished sample
toys not ready to be boxed. Shallow dishes of orange and emerald green
and bright pink and primrose and black and vivid blue.
"Yes," says the girl who is working there--she is fair and wears a
pale-green frock and a black work-apron,--"I do this part. Mr.
Dickerman, the artist, makes the pictures or designs, then we have
them turned out by the mill. See"--she shows queer shaped pieces of
wood that suggest nothing to the casual observer--"Then the rest is
done here!"
The room is full of all manner of curious and charming playthings.
Here is a real pirate's chest for your treasures--the young workwoman
is just painting the yellow nails on it--and here is a fierce-looking
pirate with a cutlass for a bookshelf end; here is a futurist
coat-hanger--a cubist-faced burglar with a jaw and the peremptory
legend: "Give me your hat, scarf and coat!" Here is a neatly capped
little waiting maid whose arms are constructed for flower holders;
here are delightful watering-pots, exquisitely painted; wonderful cake
covers, powder-boxes, blotters, brackets;--every single thing a little
gem of clever design and individual workmanship. It is more
fascinating than Toyland or Santa Claus' shop. These "rocking toys"
are particularly fascinating: the dreadnought that careens at perilous
angles, and the kicking mule which knocks its driver over as often as
you like to make it. Shelves on shelves of these wonder-things
complete, and a whole great table laden with them in half-finished
forms. Some of the little wooden figures are set in a long rack to
dry, for after the shellac has hardened each colour is put on and
allowed to dry thoroughly before applying the next. The flesh-coloured
enamel goes on first, then the other lighter shades, leaving the
darker for the last, and the inevitable touches of black to finish off
with.
"This way," says the girl in the black apron (which is really a
smock), taking up a squat but adorable little wooden figure which is
already coloured all over, but has a curiously unfinished aspect
nevertheless. She fills a tiny brush with glittering, black enamel and
begins to apply it in dots and lines. "This long dab is supposed to be
his gun. These two little squares of black make his belt. One line for
his trousers,--now he's done. He's for a blotter."
The little soldier has now taken on character and solidity as though
by magic. He grins at us, very martial and smart indeed, as he is
stood in the rack for the enamel to harden.
No one who has ever been to the workroom of one of those art shops
will ever forget it. Personally I found it more enchanting than any
regular studio I ever visited. There was quite real art there.
Remember, those designs show no mean order of genius and imagination,
and the more mechanical work is beautifully done and is constantly
given a little individual, quaint twist which stamps the toys as
personal works of art. And the whole picture,--I wish I could paint
it! The low-ceilinged room, set high up above the little court; the
sunshine and the golden square outside; the girl in the black smock
and the huge table covered with pots and saucers and jars of every
shape and size; and the vivid splashes of colour in the bright
afternoon light--scarlet and violet and yellow and indigo and
red-brown. And the wall full of strange and brilliant little figures
grinning, scowling and staring down like so many goblins!
Just as you go out of the studio your eye can scarcely fail to fall
upon one particular wooden hanger to be screwed on a door. If you know
the "Rose and the Ring" by heart, as you should, it will give you
quite a shock. It is the image of the Doorknocker into which the Fairy
Blackstick changed the wicked porter Gruffanuff! It is indeed!
You know, if all these toys should come to life some moonlit night
they would make quite a formidable array! Imagine the pirates and the
kicking mules and the cubist burglars all running wild together! And
there is something uncanny about them and their expressions that makes
one suspect that such an event is more than half likely.
Even the advertisements for such a shop could not be commonplace. The
artist in charge proclaims that: "Pirates are his specialty, and that
he will gladly furnish estimates on anything from the services of a
Pirate Crew to a Treasure Island or a Pirate Ship."
On Washington Square is another sort of workshop,--a place where
jewelry is made by hand. The girl who does this work draws her own
designs and executes them, and the results are infinitely quainter
and more beautiful than the things to be bought at jewelry shops. She
buys her copper and silver and the little gold she uses in bulk; her
jewels--semi-precious stones for the most part--come from all over the
world. In her cool, airy workroom with the green trees of the big
Square outside, this little woman heats and bends and bores her metals
and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption
that is balanced by her steady skill. It is no light or easy work,
this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable
gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment. This girl is an artist,
not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic
figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so
because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare,
exotic tints of shimmering gems.
Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver--the design is of a water
lily, fragile and delicate. In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a
pale-green jewel called peridot. Here is the soft, rich blue of _lapis
lazuli_--here the keener azure of turquoise matrix. Here is a Mexican
opal, full of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from its
burnished-copper setting. What a terrible, yet beautiful ornament!
One would be, I imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell
while wearing it. Here, cool and pale and pure as a moonbeam, is a
little water opal,--set in silver of course. Here is an "abalone
blister," iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it something of
"the shade and the shine of the sea" from which the mother-shell
originally came. Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of
strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all ending in "ite." To
model with metal for clay--to paint with jewels for colour! Does it
not sound like very real and very fascinating art?
These are passing glimpses of but two of the art industries of the
Village. There are many others--enough to fill a book all by
themselves. There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and those who
carve wood; who make exquisite lace, who make furniture of quaint and
original design. There are the designers and decorators, whose brains
are full of graceful images and whose fingers are quick and facile to
carry them out. There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic
young people--they are nearly all of them young--who from sunrise to
sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is
on earth.
The making of box furniture, for instance, sounds commonplace enough, but
it is really fascinating. There are places in the Village,--notably one
on Greenwich Avenue,--where these clever craftsmen make wonderful things
from cubic forms of wood, from boxes and sticks and laths and blocks.
They can make anything from a desk to a tall candlestick, and, softly
coloured, the square, wooden objects make a highly decorative effect. It
is a simple art but a striking one, and the aesthetic sense, the instinct
for balance and proportion and ultimate beauty of line and composition,
has a splendid outlet.
There is, too, the trade of the designer of garments: the word is
advisedly substituted for dresses. The real designer plans and
executes pictures, mood-expressions, character settings. She dreams
herself into the personalities of her clients, also the necessities
and the limitations! Do you think all the artistic costume-creating is
done in the Rue de la Paix? Try the Village!
And the florists! The flower shops of the Village are truly lovely,
one in particular, the Peculiar Flower Shop, which does not look at
all like a shop but like the corner of a country garden. The Village
loves flowers and understands them. Every Villager who can, grows
them. Believe me, you know nothing about flowers in an intimate sense
until you have talked with a flower-loving Villager!
Think of it--you outsiders who imagine that you are exhibiting a fine,
artistic tendency by going to an occasional exhibition, and in knowing
what colours can discreetly be worn together! Here is a small army of
vigourous idealists who live, breathe and create beauty; whose happy,
hard-working lives are filled with the exhilarating wine of art and
artistic expression; who, when night comes, never turn the keys of
their workshops without the knowledge that they have made one more
beautiful thing since dawn, one more concrete materialisation of the
art-dream in man, one more new creation to help to furnish pleasure
for a beauty-loving world!
There is something about those new forms of art work which recalls the
richer and more leisurely past, when good artisans were scarcely less
revered than great artists; when men toiled half a lifetime to fashion
one or two perfect things; when even the commonest utilitarian
articles were expected to be beautiful and were made so by the applied
genius of a race of working artists. It suggests other lands too--the
East where you will hardly ever see an ugly object, and where
everything from a pitcher to a rug is a thing of loveliness; the South
where true grace of line and colour is the rule rather than the
exception in the homeliest household utensils. Primitive peoples have
always stayed close to beauty; it is odd that it has always remained
for civilisation to suggest to man that if a thing is useful it need
not necessarily be beautiful. In a sense, then, our Villagers have
returned to a simpler, purer and surer standard. In shutting out the
rest of Philistia they have also succeeded in shutting out Philistia's
inconceivable ugliness. So the gods give them joy--the gods give them
joy!
Probably no one region on earth has been more misrepresented and
miswritten-up than the Village. Its eccentricities, harmless or
otherwise, are sufficiently conspicuous to furnish targets both for
the unscrupulous fiction-monger and the professional humourist.
Sometimes when the fun is clever enough and true enough no one minds,
the Village least of all; humour is their strong point. But they are
quite subtle souls with all their child-like peculiarities; there is,
in their acceptance of ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive of
the "Virginian's" now classic warning: "When you call me that,
_smile_!" Hence a novel written not long ago and purporting to be a
mirror of the Village--Village life and Village ideals, or lack of
them--had a peculiar result on the real Village. They knew it to be
untrue--those few who read it, that is--but they scorned to notice it.
They resented it, but to an astonishing extent they ignored it. The
title of it got to mean very little to them save a general term of
cheap and unmerited opprobrium, like some insulting epithet in a
foreign language which one knows one would dislike if one could
understand it. It is necessary to grasp these first simple facts to
appreciate the following episode:
A certain young Villager--I shall not give his name, but he is an
artist of growing and striking reputation, dark-eyed and rather
attractive looking--burst into a friend's studio pale with anger:
"See here, have you a copy of 'The Trufflers'?"
"Not guilty," swore the surprised friend. "Why on earth do you
want--"
But the young artist had dashed forth again, hot upon his quest. A few
houses down the street, he made another spectacular entrance with the
same cry;--at another and still another. One friend frankly confessed
he had never heard of the book, another expressed indignation that he
should be suspected of owning a copy. But not until the temperamental,
brown-eyed artist had visited several acquaintances was he able to
get what he wanted.
When the long-sought volume was in his grasp, he heaved a sigh of
something more emphatic than relief.
"How much did you pay for this thing?" he demanded.
"I didn't. I borrowed it."
"Oh-- See here. Can't you say you lost it?"
"I suppose so, if you want it as much as all that."
The young artist sat down and began seriously to tear the book to
pieces.
"Well, for the love of Mike!" cried the friend. "Do you hate it like
that?"
"I never read more than three pages of it," said the artist, steadily
tearing, "but a slumming creature, a girl from uptown came into the
'Pirate's Den' yesterday where I was sitting, and, after staring at me
fascinatedly for five minutes, leaned over to me and murmured
breathlessly:
"'Oh, tell me, _aren't you a Truffler_?' I couldn't wring her neck,
and so--"
Another handful of torn pages fluttered from his hand.
Of course, there are always the faddists and theorists, who take
their ideals as hard as mumps or measles. Because the Village is so
kind to new ideas, these flourish there for a time.
Here is a little tale told about a certain talented and charming lady
who had a very complete set of theories and wished to try them out on
Greenwich. One of her pet theories was that The People were naturally
aesthetic; that The People's own untutored instinct would always
unerringly select the best; that it was an insult to the noble
idealism of The People to try to educate them; they were, so to speak,
born with an education, ready-made, automatic, in sound working order
from the beginning. Now, anyone almost may have theories, but if they
are wise souls they won't try to apply them. If they have never been
practically tested they can't be proved fallacious and thus may be
treasured and loved and petted indefinitely, to the comfort of the
individual and the edification of the multitude. But this fair
idealist would not let well enough alone. She wanted to put her
favourite theory to the acid test. So this is what she did.
In the one-time roadhouse on Washington Square was a saloon the name
of which suggested an embryotic impulse toward poetry; or perhaps she
picked that particular "pub" at random. At all events she walked into
the bar, put her foot up on the traditional rail and began to converse
with the barkeep.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON SQUARE SOUTH. The studio quarter.]
She asked him if he had ever seen any of Shakespeare's plays, and he
said no. She asked him if he would like to see one. He said sure--he'd
try anything once. She invited him to go to see "Hamlet" with her, and
he said he was game. Lest his sensitive feelings be hurt by finding
himself a humble daw among the peacocks of the rich, gay world, she
bought seats in the balcony and wore her shabbiest gown.
When he called for her she felt slightly faint. He was in evening
dress, the most impeccable evening dress conceivable, even to the
pumps and the opera hat. He, too, looked a little shocked when he saw
her. Doubtless he would have asked her to dine at Rector's first if
she had been properly dressed. They both recovered sufficiently to go
to "Hamlet," and she trembled lest he would not like it. She need not
have worried--or rather she had more cause to worry than she knew.
Like it? He loved it; he shouted with honest mirth from first to last.
And, when it was over--
"Say," he burst out, "that beats any musical comedy show hollow! _It's
the funniest thing I ever see in my life!_"
Henceforward that dear lady did not let her theories out in a cold
world, but kept them safe in cotton wool under lock and key.
There are fakers in the Village--just as there are fakers everywhere
else. Only, of course, the ardour of new ideas which sincerely
animates the Village does lend itself to all manner of poses. And
because of this a perfectly earnest movement will attract a number of
superficial dilettanti who dabble in it until it is in disrepute. And,
vice versa, a crassly artificial fad will, by its novelty and
picturesqueness, draw some of the real thinking people. Such
inconsistencies and discrepancies are bound to occur in any such
mental crucible as Greenwich. And, moreover, if the true and the false
get a bit mixed once in a way, the wise traveller who goes to learn
and not to sit in judgment will not look upon it to the disadvantage
or the disparagement of the Village. Young, fervent and courageous
souls may make a vast quantity of mistakes ere they be proved wrong
with any sort of sound reasoning. If our Villagers run off at tangents
on occasion, follow a few false gods and tie the cosmos into knots, it
is, one may take it, rather to their credit than otherwise. No one
ever accomplished anything by sitting still and looking at a wall. And
it is far better to make a fool of yourself with an intense object,
than to make nothing of yourself and have no particular object at
all!
There are all sorts of fakers--conscious or otherwise. There is the
futurist, post-impressionist _poseur_ who more than half believes in
his own pose. Possibly two small incidents may indicate what the
genuine Villagers think of him.
There was once a post-impressionist exhibition at the Liberal Club,
and a certain young man who shall be nameless was placed in charge of
it. He was a perfectly sane young man and he knew that many of the
"art specimens" hung on such occasions were flagrant frauds. Sketch
after sketch, study after study, was sent in to him as master of
ceremonies until, in his own words, he became so "fed up with
post-impressionism that he could not stand another daub of the stuff!"
The worm turned eventually, and he vowed to teach those "artists" a
short, sweet lesson. He knew nothing about painting, being a writer by
trade, but he had the run of several studios and could collect paint
as he willed. After fortifying himself with a sufficiency of Dutch
courage, he set up a canvas and painted a picture. It had no subject,
no lines, no scheme, no integral idea. It was just a squareful of
paint--and it held every shade and variety of paint that he could lay
his hands on. He says that he took a wicked satisfaction in smearing
the colours upon that desecrated canvas. His disgust with the futurist
artists who had submitted their works for exhibition was one element
to nerve his arm and fire his resentful spirit--another was the
stimulus he had, in sheer desperation, wooed so recklessly. When the
thing was done it was something for angels and devils alike to tremble
before. It meant nothing, of course, but, like many inscrutable and
unfathomable things, it terrified by its sheer blank, chaotic madness.
He hung it in the exhibition. And it was--yes, it was--the hit of the
occasion. This is not a fairy tale--not even fiction. The story was
told me by the culprit--or was it genius?--himself.
And then people began to talk about it and speculate on what its real,
inner meaning might be. They said it was a "mood picture," a "study in
soul-tones" and a lot more like that. They even asked the guilty man
what he thought of it. When he coldly responded that he thought it
"looked like the devil" they told him that, of course he would say so:
he had no soul for art.
Now, he had signed this horror, but (let me quote him): "I had signed
it in a post-impressionist style, so no one on the earth could read
the name."
After a few days an artist came along who was not wholly obsessed
with the new craze. He studied the thing on the wall, and after a
while he said: "Someone is guying you. That isn't a picture. It's a
joke."
The futurist devotees were indignant, but there were enough who were
stung by faint suspicion to investigate. They studied that signature
upside down and under a microscope. After a while they got the
identity of the man responsible for it, and--we draw a veil over the
rest!
Then there was the man--another one--who, by way of a cheerful
experiment, painted a post-impressionist picture with a billiard cue,
jabbing gaily at the canvas as though trying to make difficult screwed
shots, caroms and so on. Having done his worst in this way, he then
took his picture to a gallery and exhibited it upside down. It
attracted much attention and a fair quota of praise.
Stories such as these might discourage one if one did not keep
remembering that even in far deeper and greater affairs of life, "A
hair perhaps divides the false and true." Who are we to improve on
Omar's wise and tolerant philosophy?
I have less sympathy with the girl who wrote poetry, and even
occasionally sold it, at so much a line. Having sold a poem of
eighteen lines for $9.00 she almost wept because, as she ingenuously
complained, she might just as easily have written twenty lines for
$10.00!
Then there is the fair Villager who intones Walt Whitman to music of
her own composition; that is a bit trying, I grant you. And the male
Villager who frequents spiritualistic seances and communes with dead
poets.
One night Emerson presided. And, after the ghosts had departed, the
spiritualistic Villager read some of his own poems.
"And do you know," he declared, enraptured, "everyone thought it was
still Emerson who was speaking!"
Now for him we may have sympathy. He is perhaps a faker, but I am
inclined to believe that he is that anachronism, a sincere faker. He
is on the level. Like two-thirds of the Village, he is playing his
game with his whole heart and soul, with all that is in him. I am
afraid that it would be hard to say as much for a certain class of
outside-the-Village fakers who, from time to time, drift into the
cheery confines thereof and carry away sacks of shekels--though not,
let us hope, as much as they wanted to get!
Have you ever heard, for instance, of the psychoanalysts? They
diagnose soul troubles as regular doctors diagnose diseases of the
body, and they are in great demand. Some of them are alienists,
healers of sick brains; some of them are just--fakers. They charge
immense prices, and just for the moment the blessed Village--always
passionately hospitable to new cults and theories and visions--is
receiving them cordially, with arms and purses that are both wide
open.
None of us can afford to depreciate the genius nor the judgment of
Freud, but I defy any Freud-alienist to efficiently psychoanalyse the
Village! By the time he were half done with the job he would be a
Villager himself and then--pouf! That for his psychoanalysis!
Have you ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism,
inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism--"The Crock of Gold"--by
one James Stevens? The author is not a Villager, and his message is
one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another,
an older and a more intimately wise land than ours. But when I read of
those pure, half-pagan immortals in the dance of the _Sluaige Shee_
(the Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village
might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations
of themselves and their own lives--"The lovers of gaiety and peace,
long defrauded."
The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey world-dwellers,--or
Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to
know about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend):
"Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are--ye who live
among strangers in the houses of dismay and
self-righteousness. Poor, awkward ones! How bewildered and
be-devilled ye go!... In what prisons are ye flung? To what
lowliness are ye bowed? How are ye ground between the laws
and the customs? Come away! For the dance has begun lightly,
the wind is sounding over the hill...."