traveling. Rarely at home, they go from city to city. The temptations to
these men are peculiar and very great. In 1879, Mr. E.W. Watkins,
himself one of this class of commercial travelers, was appointed
secretary in their behalf. He has since visited all the principal
associations, and has created an interest in these neglected men. Among
the appliances which are productive of the most good is the traveler's
ticket, which entitles him to all the privileges of membership in any
place where an association may be. A second most valuable work is the
hotel-visiting done by more than fifty associations each week. The
hotel-registers are consulted on Saturday afternoon, and a personal note
is sent to each young man, giving him the times of service at the
several churches and inviting him to the rooms. Is it necessary to call
the attention of business men to the importance to themselves of this
work? Is it not patent? You cannot follow the young man whose honesty
and clear-headedness is of such consequence to you. God has put it into
the heart of this association to try and care for those men, upon whom
your success largely depends. Can you be blind to its value? Every
individual man who employs commercial travelers should aid the work. But
how is all this great work for young men carried on? It requires now
thirty thousand dollars a year to do it. Of this sum New York pays more
than one half, Pennsylvania about one sixth, and Massachusetts less than
one fifteenth. But to do this work properly,--this work of the universal
church of Christ for young men,--at least one third more, or forty
thousand dollars a year, is needed. There is another need, however, much
harder to meet--the men to fill the places calling earnestly for general
secretaries. There are nearly three hundred and fifty paid employees in
the field, representing about two hundred associations. Since every
association should have a secretary, and there are nearly, if not quite,
nine hundred, the need will be clearly seen. This need it is proposed to
meet by training men in schools established for the purpose. Something
of this has already been done in New York State and at Peoria, Illinois,
and there must soon be a regular training-school established to
accommodate from fifty to one hundred men.
This is a very meagre sketch of a great work. How inadequately it
portrays it, none know so well as those who are immediately connected
with it. Could you have been present at a dinner given a few months ago
to the secretaries of the international committee, and heard each man
describe his field and its needs; could you have seen the intensity with
which each endeavored to make us feel what he himself realized, that his
special field was the most important,--you would have come to our
conclusion: that each field was all-important, and that each man was in
his proper place, peculiarly fitted for it and assigned to it by the
Master.
A prominent divine has lately said: "I believe the Young Men's Christian
Association to be the greatest religious fact of the nineteenth
century."
What has been effected by this fact? Thousands of young men in all parts
of the world have been brought to Jesus Christ. It has been the
training-school for Moody, Whittle, and hosts of laymen who are to-day
proclaiming the simple Gospel. It has organized great evangelistic
movements both here and abroad. It formed the Christian Commission,
which not only relieved the wants of the body during our war, but sent
hundreds of Christ's missionaries to the hospitals and battle-fields. It
has gloriously manifested the unity of Christ's true church. It stands
to-day an organic body, instinct with one life, spreading its limbs
through the world, active, alert, ready at any moment to respond to the
call of the church, and enables it to present an unbroken front to
superstition and infidelity, which already rear their brazen heads
against Christ and his church, and will soon be in open rebellion and
actual warfare, and which Christ at his coming will forever destroy.
[NOTE.--Through the kindness of Messrs. Harper and Brothers, of New
York, we present to our readers the two portraits in this article. For
the cuts of the buildings we are indebted to the Chicago Watchman,
mention of which is made above.--R.S., Jr.]
* * * * *
GEORGE FULLER.
BY SIDNEY DICKINSON.
The death of George Fuller has removed a strong and original figure from
the activity of American art, and added a weighty name to its history.
To speak of him now, while his work is fresh in the public mind, is a
labor of some peril; so easy is it, when the sense of loss is keen, to
make mistakes in judgment, and to allow the friendly spirit to prevail
over the judicial, in an estimation of him as a man and a painter. Yet
he has gone in and out before us long enough to make a study of him
profitable, and to give us, even now, some occasion for an opinion as to
the place he is likely to occupy in the annals of our native art. Mr.
Fuller held a peculiar position in American painting, and one which
seems likely to remain hereafter unfilled. He followed no one, and had
no followers; his art was the outgrowth of personal temperament and
experience, rather than the result of teaching, and although he studied
others, he was himself his only master. In other men whose names are
prominent in our art, we seem to see the direction of an outside
influence. Stuart and Copley confessed to the teaching of the English
school of their day--a school brilliant but formal, and holding close
guiding-reins over its disciples; Benjamin West became denationalized,
so far as his art was concerned; Allston showed the impression of
England, Italy, and Flanders, all at once, in his refined and thoughtful
style, and Hunt manifested in every stroke of his brilliant brush the
learned and facile methods that are in vogue in the leading ateliers of
modern Paris. In these men, and in the followers whom their preëminent
ability drew after them, we perceive the dominant impulse to be of alien
origin; Fuller alone, of all the great ones in our art, was in thought
and action purely and simply American. The influence that led others
into the error of imitation, seems to have been exerted unavailingly
upon his self-reliant mind. We shall search vainly if we look elsewhere
than within himself for the suggestions upon which his art was
established. Superficial resemblances to other painters are sometimes to
be noted in his works, but in governing principle and habit of thought
he was serenely and grandly alone.
We must regard him thus if we would study him understandingly, and gain
from our observation a correct estimate of his power. We think of our
other painters as in the crowd, and amid the affairs of men, and detect
in their art a certain uneasiness which the bustle about them
necessarily caused. We perceive this most in Hunt, who was emphatically
a man of the world, and in Stuart, who shows in some of his later work
that his position as the court painter of America, while it aided his
purse and reputation, harmed his repose; least in Allston, whose tastes
were literary, whose love was in retirement, and who would have been a
poet had not circumstances first placed a brush and palette in his
hands. Allston, however, enjoyed popularity, and was courted by the best
society of his time, and was not permitted, although he doubtless longed
for it, to indulge to its full extent his chaste and dreamy fancy. It
may be said without disrespect to his undoubted powers, that he would
have been less esteemed in his own day if his art had not been largely
conventional, and thus easily understood by those who had studied the
accepted masters of painting. He lacked positive force of idea, as his
works clearly show,--that quality which was among the most
characteristic traits of Fuller's method, and made him at once the
greatest genius, and the man most misunderstood, among contemporary
American painters.
Although men who have not had "advantages" in life are naturally prone
to regret their deprivation, they frequently owe their success to this
seeming bar against opportunity. We have often seen illustrated in our
art the fact that favorable circumstances do not necessarily insure
success, and now from the life of Fuller we gain the still more
important truth, that power is never so well aroused as in the face of
obstacles. Few men endured more for art than he; none have waited more
uncomplainingly for a recognition that was sure to come by-and-by, or
received with greater serenity the approbation which the dull world came
at last to bestow. His history is most wholesome in its record of
steadfast resting upon conviction, and teaches quite as strongly as his
pictures do, the value of absorption in a lofty idea.
If the saying that those nations are the happiest that have no history
is true of men, Mr. Fuller's life must be regarded as exceptionally
fortunate. Considered by itself, it was quiet and uneventful, and had
little to excite general interest; but when viewed in its relation to
the practice of his art, it is found to be full of eloquent suggestions
to all who, like him, have been appointed to win success through
suffering. The narrative of his experience comprises two great
periods--the preparation, which covered thirty-four years, and the
achievement, to the enjoyment of which less than eight years were
permitted. The first period is subdivided into two, of which one
embraces eighteen years, from the time when, at the age of twenty, he
entered upon the study of his art, to his retirement from the world to
the exile of his Deerfield farm; the other including sixteen years of
seclusion, until, at the age of fifty-four, he came forth again to
proclaim a new revelation. The first part of his career may be dismissed
without any extended consideration. Its record consists of an almost
unrelieved account of struggle, indifferent success, and lack of
appreciation and encouragement, in the cities of Boston and New York.
In Boston he appeared as the student, rather than the producer of works,
and laid the foundation of his style in observation of the paintings of
Stuart, Copley, Allston, and Alexander,--all excellent models upon which
to base a practice, although destined to show little of their influence
upon the pictures which he painted in the maturity of his power. It is
not to be doubted, however, that all these men, and particularly Stuart,
made an impression upon him which he was never afterward wholly able to
conceal. We may see even in some of his latest works, under his own
peculiar manner, suggestions of Stuart, particularly in portraits of
women, which in pose and expression, and to a considerable degree in
color, show much of that dignity and composure which so distinguish the
female heads of our greatest portrait-painter. He always admired Stuart,
and in his later years spoke much of him, with strong appreciation for
his skill in describing character, and the refined taste which is such a
marked feature of his best manner.
His work in Boston made no particular impression upon the public mind,
and after five years' trial of it he removed to New York, where he
joined that brilliant circle of painters and sculptors which, with its
followers, has made one of the strongest impressions, if not the most
valuable or permanent, upon the art of America. During his residence in
that city he devoted himself almost exclusively to portrait-painting, in
which he developed a manner more distinguished for conventional
excellence than any particular individuality. It was remarked of him,
however, that he was disposed, even at this time, to seek to present the
thought and disposition of his subjects more strongly than their merely
physical features, and among his principal associates excited no little
appreciative comment upon this tendency. In some of his portraits of
women of that period, wherein he evidently attempted to present the
superior fineness and sensibility of the feminine nature, this effort
toward ideality is quite strongly indicated; they are painted with a
more hesitating and lingering touch than his portraits of men, and with
a certain seeming lack of confidence, which throws about them a thin
fold of that veil of etherialism and mystery which so enwraps nearly all
his pictures of the last eight years. This treatment, however, seems to
have been at that time more the result of experiment than conviction;
later in life he wrought its suggestions into a system, the principles
of which we may study further on. His earlier work, as has been said,
was chiefly confined to portrait-painting, although it is a significant
fact that among his pictures of that time are two which show that the
feeling for poetical and imaginative effort was working in him. At a
comparatively early age he painted an impression of Coleridge's
Genevieve, which showed marked evidence of power, and later, after
seeing a picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his
artist friends, produced a study which he afterward seems to have
developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding
a bird closely against its breast. These exercises, however, seem to
have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in
leading him to the practice in which he afterward became absorbed.
His life in New York, which was interrupted only by three winter trips
to the South, whither he went in the hope of securing some commissions
for portraits, was an uneventful experience of very modest pecuniary
success, and brought him as the only official honor of his life an
election as associate of the National Academy of Design. He then went to
Europe, where, for eight months, he carefully studied the old masters in
the principal galleries of England and the Continent. This visit to the
Old World was of incalculable value to him in the method of painting
which he afterward made his own, and, in point of fact, gave him his
first decided inclination toward it. Its best influence, however, was in
giving him confidence in himself, and assurance of the reasonableness of
the views which he had already begun to entertain. He had been led
before to regard the old masters as superior to rivalry and incapable of
weakness, superhuman characters, indeed, whose works should discourage
effort. Instead of this, however, he found them to be men like himself,
with their share of defect and error, yet made grand by inspiration and
idea, and this knowledge greatly encouraged him, a man who of all
painters was at once the most modest and devoted. Most painters who
resort to Europe to study the old art find there one or two men whose
works make the strongest appeals to their liking, and, devoting their
attention chiefly to these, they show ever after the marks of an
influence that is easily traced to its source; Fuller, however, observed
with broader and more penetrating view, and, as his works show, seems to
have studied men less than principles, and to have been filled with
admiration, not so much for particular practices as for the common and
lofty spirit in which the greatest of the world's painters labored. The
colorists and chiaroscurists, such as Titian on the one hand and
Rembrandt on the other, seem to have impressed him particularly, and of
all men Titian the most strongly, as many of his pictures testify, and
as such glowing works as the Arethusa and the Boy and Bird unmistakably
show. Yet it was not in matter or in manner, but in the expression of a
great truth, that the old masters most strongly affected him. He felt at
once, and grew to admire greatly, their repose and modesty, calm
strength and undisturbed temper, and drew from them the important
principle that true genius may be known by its confessing neither pride
nor self-distrust. The serenity of their style he sought at once to
appropriate, and thereafter worked as much as possible in imitation of
their evident purpose, striving simply to do his best, without any
question of whether the result would please, or another's effort be
reckoned as greater than his own. It became a governing principle with
him never to seek to outdo any one, or to feel anything but pleasure at
another's success, for he was not a man who could fail to recognize the
truth that envy is fatal to a fine mood in any labor. Few artists, we
may well believe, study the great art of the world in this spirit, or
derive from it such a lesson.
On his return to America, he betook himself to his native town of
Deerfield, to assume for a time the care of the ancestral farm, which
the death of his father had placed in his hands. He had returned from
Europe full of inspired ideas, and was apparently ready to go on at once
in new paths of labor; but the voice of duty seemed to him to call him
away from his chosen life, and he obeyed its summons without hesitation.
Moreover, he loved the country and the family homestead, and may have
perceived, also, that the condition of art in Boston and New York was
not such as to encourage an original purpose, and that, if he was ever
to gain success, he must develop himself in quiet, and aloof from the
distracting influences of other methods and men. It is easy to perceive,
with the complete record of his life before us, that this experience of
labor and thought upon the Deerfield farm, although at first sight
forming an hiatus in his career, was really its most pregnant period,
and that without it the Fuller who is now so much admired might have
been lost to us, and the spirit that appears in his later works never
have been awakened. It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no congenial
dwelling-place in towns, but makes its home in the fields and on the
hillsides, to which the poet-painter, depressed but not cast down by his
experience of life, repaired to work and dream. For sixteen years, in
the midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the
contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet
of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The
secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and
melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from
the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may
gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he
drew from the New-England soil that he tilled, and the air that he
breathed, an inspiration which never failed him. The flavor of the quiet
valley fills all his canvases. We see in them the spaciousness of its
meadows, the inviting slope of its low hills, the calm grandeur of its
encircling mountains, the mysterious gloom and wholesome brightness of
its changing skies, the atmosphere of history and romance which is its
breath and life. Song and story have found many incidents for treatment
in this locality. Not far from the farm where Fuller's daily work was
done, the tragedy of Bloody Brook was enacted; the fields which he
tilled have their legend of Indian ambuscade and massacre; the soil is
sown, as with dragon's teeth, with the arrow-heads and battle-axes of
many bitter conflicts; even to the ancient house where, in recent years,
the painter's summer easel was set up, a former owner was brought home
with the red man's bullet in his breast. The menace of midnight attack
seems even now to the wanderer in the darkness to burden the air of
these mournful meadows, and tradition shows that here were felt the
ripples of that tide of superstitious frenzy which flowed from Salem
through all the early colonies. No place could have furnished more
potent suggestions to the art-idealist than this, and although it did
not lead him to paint its tragic history (for no man had less liking for
violence and passion than he), it impressed him deeply with its
concurrent records of endurance and devotion. Nor did it invite him, as
it might have done in the case of a weaker man, into mere description,
but having aroused his thought, it submitted itself wholly to the
treatment of his strong and original genius. He approached his task with
a broad and comprehensive vision, and a loving and inquiring soul. He
was not satisfied with the revelation of his eyes alone, but sought
earnestly for the secret of nature's life, and of its influence upon
the sensitive mind of man. He perceived the truth that nature without
man is naught, even as there is no color without light, and strove
earnestly to show in his art the relations that they sustain to each
other. He saw, also, that the material in each is nothing without the
spirit which they share in common, and thus he painted not places, but
the influence of places, even as he painted not persons merely, but
their natures and minds. It is for this reason that, although we see in
all his pictures where landscape finds a place the meadows, trees, and
skies of Deerfield, we also see much more,--the general and unlocated
spirit of New-England scenery.
This is the true impressionism--a system to which Fuller was always
constant in later life, and which he developed grandly. He was, however,
as far removed as possible from that cheap, shallow, and idealess school
of French painters whose wrongful appropriation of the name
"Impressionist" has prejudiced us against the principle that it
involves. The inherent difference between them and Fuller lies in
this--he exercised a choice, and thought the beautiful alone to be
worthy of description, while they selected nothing, but painted
indiscriminately all things, with whatever preference they indicated
lying in the direction of the strong and ugly, as being most imperative
in its demands for attention. Fuller's subjects were always sweet and
noble, and it followed as a matter of course that his treatment of them
was refined and strong. His idea was also broad; he sought for the
typical in nature and life, and grew inevitably into a continually
widening and more comprehensive style. He taught himself to lose the
sense of detail, and to strike at once to the centre, presenting the
vital idea with decision, and departing from it with increasing
vagueness of treatment, until the whole area of his work was filled with
a harmonious and carefully graduated sense of suggestion. He arrived at
his method by an original way of studying the natural world. He did not,
as most artists do, take his paint-box and easel and devote himself to
description, and from his studies work out the finished picture.
Instead, he disencumbered himself of all materials for making memoranda,
and merely stood before the scene that impressed him, looking upon it
for hours at a time. Then he betook himself to his studio, and there
worked from the impression that his mind had formed under the
guiding-hand of his fancy, the result being that nature and human
thought appeared together upon the canvas, giving a double grace and
power. The process was subtle, and not to be described clearly even by
the painter himself, who found his work so largely a matter of
inspiration that he was never able to make copies of his pictures. They
grew out of his consciousness in a strange way whose secret he could not
grasp; to the end of his life he was an inquirer, always hesitating, and
never confident in anything except that art was truth, and that he who
followed it must walk in modesty and humbleness of spirit before the
greatness of its mystery. A man of ideas and sentiment, remote from the
clamor of schools and the complaints of critics, with recollections of
the grandest art of the world in his mind, and beautiful aspects of
nature continually before his eyes, he could hardly fail to work out a
style of marked originality. The effort, however, was slow; one does not
erase on the instant the impressions that eighteen years of study and
practice have made, and Fuller found his life at Deerfield none too long
to rid him of his respect for formulas.