'Some men when they grow rich, store pictures in a gallery,' Living,
their friends envy them, and after death the genuineness of the
collection is disputed under the dispersing hammer.
A better way is to spread your picture over all earth; visiting them as
Fate allows. Then none can steal or deface, nor any reverse of fortune
force a sale; sunshine and tempest warm and ventilate the gallery for
nothing, and--in spite of all that has been said of her
crudeness--Nature is not altogether a bad frame-maker. The knowledge
that you may never live to see an especial treasure twice teaches the
eyes to see quickly while the light lasts; and the possession of such a
gallery breeds a very fine contempt for painted shows and the smeary
things that are called pictures.
In the North Pacific, to the right hand as you go westward, hangs a
small study of no particular value as compared with some others. The
mist is down on an oily stretch of washed-out sea; through the mist the
bats-wings of a sealing schooner are just indicated. In the foreground,
all but leaping out of the frame, an open rowboat, painted the rawest
blue and white, rides up over the shoulder of a swell. A man in
blood-red jersey and long boots, all shining with moisture, stands at
the bows holding up the carcase of a silver-bellied sea-otter from whose
pelt the wet drips in moonstones. Now the artist who could paint the
silver wash of the mist, the wriggling treacly reflection of the boat,
and the raw red wrists of the man would be something of a workman.
But my gallery is in no danger of being copied at present. Three years
since, I met an artist in the stony bed of a brook, between a line of
300 graven, lichened godlings and a flaming bank of azaleas, swearing
horribly. He had been trying to paint one of my pictures--nothing more
than a big water-worn rock tufted with flowers and a snow-capped hill
for background. Most naturally he failed, because there happened to be
absolutely no perspective in the thing, and he was pulling the lines
about to make some for home consumption. No man can put the contents of
a gallon jar into a pint mug. The protests of all uncomfortably-crowded
mugs since the world began have settled that long ago, and have given us
the working theories, devised by imperfect instruments for imperfect
instruments, which are called Rules of Art.
Luckily, those who painted my gallery were born before man. Therefore,
my pictures, instead of being boxed up by lumbering bars of gold, are
disposed generously between latitudes, equinoxes, monsoons, and the
like, and, making all allowance for an owner's partiality, they are
really not so bad.
'Down in the South where the ships never go'--between the heel of New
Zealand and the South Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer
trying to come round in the trough of a big beam sea. The wet light of
the day's end comes more from the water than the sky, and the waves are
colourless through the haze of the rain, all but two or three blind
sea-horses swinging out of the mist on the ship's dripping weather side.
A lamp is lighted in the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls
on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as they snatch up the
rudder-chains. A big sea has got home. Her stern flies up in the lather
of a freed screw, and her deck from poop to the break of the foc's'le
goes under in gray-green water level as a mill-race except where it
spouts up above the donkey-engine and the stored derrick-booms. Forward
there is nothing but this glare; aft, the interrupted wake drives far to
leeward, a cut kite-string dropped across the seas. The sole thing that
has any rest in the turmoil is the jewelled, unwinking eye of an
albatross, who is beating across wind leisurely and unconcerned, almost
within hand's touch. It is the monstrous egotism of that eye that makes
the picture. By all the rules of art there should be a lighthouse or a
harbour pier in the background to show that everything will end happily.
But there is not, and the red eye does not care whether the thing
beneath its still wings stays or staves.
The sister-panel hangs in the Indian Ocean and tells a story, but is
none the worse for that. Here you have hot tropical sunlight and a
foreshore clothed in stately palms running out into a still and steamy
sea burnished steel blue. Along the foreshore, questing as a wounded
beast quests for lair, hurries a loaded steamer never built for speed.
Consequently, she tears and threshes the water to pieces, and piles it
under her nose and cannot put it under her cleanly. Coir-coloured cargo
bales are stacked round both masts, and her decks are crammed and
double-crammed with dark-skinned passengers--from the foc's'le where
they interfere with the crew to the stern where they hamper the wheel.
The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a holiday air, a little
out of keeping with the yellow and black cholera flag at her main. She
dare not stop; she must not communicate with any one. There are leprous
streaks of lime-wash trickling down her plates for a sign of this. So
she threshes on down the glorious coast, she and her swarming
passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday eating out
her heart.
Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before we have done with
blue water. Most of the nations of the earth are at issue under a
stretch of white awning above a crowded deck. The cause of the dispute,
a deep copper bowl full of rice and fried onions, is upset in the
foreground. Malays, Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans--the
whole gamut of racetints, from saffron to tar-black--are twisting and
writhing round it, while their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald
turbans and head-cloths are lying underfoot. Pressed against the yellow
ochre of the iron bulwarks to left and right are frightened women and
children in turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes. They are half
protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw mats, red lacquer boxes, and
plaited bamboo trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper
_hukas_, silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and properties
enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild. In the centre of the crowd of
furious half-naked men, the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from
collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue
devils, holds the eye first. It is a wicked back. Beyond it is the
flicker of a Malay _kris_. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a
stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror.
Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from
their ripening-places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters.
One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear. His
owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, kneels over the animal, his body-cloth
thrown clear of a hard brown arm, his fingers ready to loose the
muzzle-strap. The ship's cook, in blood-stained white, watches from the
butcher's shop, and a black Zanzibari stoker grins through the bars of
the engine-room-hatch, one ray of sun shining straight into his pink
mouth. The officer of the watch, a red-whiskered man, is kneeling down
on the bridge to peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, thin
black revolver from his left hand to his right. The faithful sunlight
that puts everything into place, gives his whiskers and the hair on the
back of his tanned wrist just the colour of the copper pot, the bear's
fur and the trampled pines. For the rest, there is the blue sea beyond
the awnings.
Three years' hard work, beside the special knowledge of a lifetime,
would be needed to copy--even to copy--this picture. Mr. So-and-so,
R.A., could undoubtedly draw the bird; Mr. Such-another (equally R.A.)
the bear; and scores of gentlemen the still life; but who would be the
man to pull the whole thing together and make it the riotous, tossing
cataract of colour and life that it is? And when it was done, some
middle-aged person from the provinces, who had never seen a pineapple
out of a plate, or a _kris_ out of the South Kensington, would say that
it did not remind him of something that it ought to remind him of, and
therefore that it was bad. If the gallery could be bequeathed to the
nation, something might, perhaps, be gained, but the nation would
complain of the draughts and the absence of chairs. But no matter. In
another world we shall see certain gentlemen set to tickle the backs of
Circe's swine through all eternity. Also, they will have to tickle with
their bare hands.
The Japanese rooms, visited and set in order for the second time, hold
more pictures than could be described in a month; but most of them are
small and, excepting always the light, within human compass. One,
however, might be difficult. It was an unexpected gift, picked up in a
Tokio bye-street after dark. Half the town was out for a walk, and all
the people's clothes were indigo, and so were the shadows, and most of
the paper-lanterns were drops of blood red. By the light of smoking
oil-lamps people were selling flowers and shrubs--wicked little dwarf
pines, stunted peach and plum trees, wisteria bushes clipped and twisted
out of all likeness to wholesome plants, leaning and leering out of
green-glaze pots. In the flickering of the yellow flames, these forced
cripples and the yellow faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically
all together. As the light steadied they would return to the pretence of
being green things till a puff of the warm night wind among the flares
set the whole line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their shadows
capering on the house fronts behind them.
At a corner of a street, some rich men had got together and left
unguarded all the gold, diamonds, and rubies of the East; but when you
came near you saw that this treasure was only a gathering of goldfish in
glass globes--yellow, white, and red fish, with from three to five
forked tails apiece and eyes that bulged far beyond their heads. There
were wooden pans full of tiny ruby fish, and little children with nets
dabbled and shrieked in chase of some special beauty, and the frightened
fish kicked up showers of little pearls with their tails. The children
carried lanterns in the shape of small red paper fish bobbing at the end
of slivers of bamboo, and these drifted through the crowd like a strayed
constellation of baby stars. When the children stood at the edge of a
canal and called down to unseen friends in boats the pink lights were
all reflected orderly below. The light of the thousand small lights in
the street went straight up into the darkness among the interlacing
telegraph wires, and just at the edge of the shining haze, on a sort of
pigeon-trap, forty feet above ground, sat a Japanese fireman, wrapped up
in his cloak, keeping watch against fires. He looked unpleasantly like a
Bulgarian atrocity or a Burmese 'deviation from the laws of humanity,'
being very still and all huddled up in his roost. That was a superb
picture and it arranged itself to admiration. Now, disregarding these
things and others--wonders and miracles all--men are content to sit in
studios and, by light that is not light, to fake subjects from pots and
pans and rags and bricks that are called 'pieces of colour.' Their
collection of rubbish costs in the end quite as much as a ticket, a
first-class one, to new worlds where the 'props' are given away with the
sunshine. To do anything because it is, or may not be, new on the market
is wickedness that carries its own punishment; but surely there must be
things in this world paintable other and beyond those that lie between
the North Cape, say, and Algiers. For the sake of the pictures, putting
aside the dear delight of the gamble, it might be worth while to
venture out a little beyond the regular circle of subjects and--see what
happens. If a man can draw one thing, it has been said, he can draw
anything. At the most he can but fail, and there are several matters in
the world worse than failure. Betting on a certainty, for instance, or
playing with nicked cards is immoral, and secures expulsion from clubs.
Keeping deliberately to one set line of work because you know you can do
it and are certain to get money by so doing is, on the other hand,
counted a virtue, and secures admission to clubs. There must be a middle
way somewhere, as there must be somewhere an unmarried man with no
position, reputation, or other vanity to lose, who most keenly wants to
find out what his palette is set for in this life. He will pack his
steamer-trunk and get into the open to wrestle with effects that he can
never reproduce. All the same his will be a superb failure.
'CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS'
From Yokohama to Montreal is a long day's journey, and the forepart is
uninviting. In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to
lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a
storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan
heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging.
That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and
not used to the procession of keels. It holds a very few pictures and
the best of its stories--those relating to seal-poaching among the
Kuriles and the Russian rookeries--are not exactly fit for publication.
There is a man in Yokohama who in a previous life burned galleons with
Drake. He is a gentleman adventurer of the largest and most
resourceful--by instinct a carver of kingdoms, a ruler of men on the
high seas, and an inveterate gambler against Death. Because he supplies
nothing more than sealskins to the wholesale dealers at home, the fame
of his deeds, his brilliant fights, his more brilliant escapes, and his
most brilliant strategy will be lost among sixty-ton schooners, or told
only in the mouths of drunken seamen whom none believe. Now there sits
a great spirit under the palm trees of the Navigator Group, a thousand
leagues to the south, and he, crowned with roses and laurels, strings
together the pearls of those parts. When he has done with this down
there perhaps he will turn to the Smoky Seas and the Wonderful
Adventures of Captain--. Then there will be a tale to listen to.
But the first touch of dry land makes the sea and all upon it unreal.
Five minutes after the traveller is on the C.P.R, train at Vancouver
there is no romance of blue water, but another kind--the life of the
train into which he comes to grow as into life aboard ship. A week on
wheels turns a man into a part of the machine. He knows when the train
will stop to water, wait for news of the trestle ahead, drop the
dining-car, slip into a siding to let the West-bound mail go by, or yell
through the thick night for an engine to help push up the bank. The
snort, the snap and whine of the air-brakes have a meaning for him, and
he learns to distinguish between noises--between the rattle of a
loose lamp and the ugly rattle of small stones on a scarped
embankment--between the 'Hoot! toot!' that scares wandering cows from
the line, and the dry roar of the engine at the distance-signal. In
England the railway came late into a settled country fenced round with
the terrors of the law, and it has remained ever since just a little
outside daily life--a thing to be respected. Here it strolls along, with
its hands in its pockets and a straw in its mouth, on the heels of the
rough-hewn trail or log road--a platformless, regulationless necessity;
and it is treated even by sick persons and young children with a
familiarity that sometimes affects the death-rate. There was a small
maiden aged seven, who honoured our smoking compartment with her
presence when other excitements failed, and it was she that said to the
conductor, 'When do we change crews? I want to pick water-lilies--yellow
ones.' A mere halt she knew would not suffice for her needs; but the
regular fifteen-minute stop, when the red-painted tool-chest was taken
off the rear car and a new gang came aboard. The big man bent down to
little Impudence--'Want to pick lilies, eh? What would you do if the
cars went on and took mama away, Sis?' 'Take the, next train,' she
replied, 'and tell the conductor to send me to Brooklyn. I live there.'
'But s'pose he wouldn't?' 'He'd have to,' said Young America. 'I'd be a
lost child.'
Now, from the province of Alberta to Brooklyn, U.S.A., may be three
thousand miles. A great stretch of that distance is as new as the day
before yesterday, and strewn with townships in every stage of growth
from the city of one round house, two log huts, and a Chinese camp
somewhere in the foot-hills of the Selkirks, to Winnipeg with her
league-long main street and her warring newspapers. Just at present
there is an epidemic of politics in Manitoba, and brass bands and
notices of committee meetings are splashed about the towns. By reason
of their closeness to the Stages they have caught the contagion of
foul-mouthedness, and accusations of bribery, corruption, and
evil-living are many. It is sweet to find a little baby-city, with only
three men in it who can handle type, cursing and swearing across the
illimitable levels for all the world as though it were a grown-up
Christian centre.
All the new towns have their own wants to consider, and the first of
these is a railway. If the town is on a line already, then a new line to
tap the back country; but at all costs a line. For this it will sell its
corrupted soul, and then be very indignant because the railway before
which it has grovelled rides rough-shod over the place.
Each new town believes itself to be a possible Winnipeg until the
glamour of the thing is a little worn off, and the local paper, sliding
down the pole of Pride with the hind legs of despair, says defiantly:
'At least, a veterinary surgeon and a drug store would meet with
encouragement in our midst, and it is a fact that five new buildings
have been erected in our midst since the spring.' From a distance
nothing is easier than to smile at this sort of thing, but he must have
a cool head who can keep his pulse level when just such a wildcat
town--ten houses, two churches, and a line of rails--gets 'on the boom,'
The reader at home says, 'Yes, but it's all a lie.' It may be, but--did
men lie about Denver, Leadville, Ballarat, Broken Hill, Portland, or
Winnipeg twenty years ago--or Adelaide when town lots went begging
within the memory of middle-aged men? Did they lie about Vancouver six
years since, or Creede not twenty months gone? Hardly; and it is just
this knowledge that leads the passer-by to give ear to the wildest
statements of the wildest towns. Anything is possible, especially among
the Rockies where the minerals lie over and above the mining towns, the
centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to the farming
districts. There are literally scores upon scores of lakelets in the
hills, buried in woods now, that before twenty years are run will be
crowded summer resorts. You in England have no idea of what 'summering'
means in the States, and less of the amount of money that is spent on
the yearly holiday. People have no more than just begun to discover the
place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of Winnipeg.[1] In a
little time they will know half-a-dozen spots not a day's ride from
Montreal, and it is along that line that money will be made. In those
days, too, wheat will be grown for the English market four hundred miles
north of the present fields on the west side; and British Columbia,
perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will have
her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British
investor will no longer throw away his money on hellicat South American
republics, or give it as a hostage to the States. He will keep it in the
family as a wise man should. Then the towns that are to-day the only
names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map
as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because--but it is hopeless to make
people understand that actually and indeed, we _do_ possess an Empire of
which Canada is only one portion--an Empire which is not bounded by
election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South--an
Empire that has not yet been scratched.
[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]
Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune
come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the
steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.
But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a
desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be
compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral,
because you _do_ fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and
perspiration and sitting up far into the night--by working like a fiend,
as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it! The headlong
stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for
merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw
material of a city--men, lumber, and shingle--are shot on to the not yet
nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the
blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of
the city's one electric light--a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked
pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar
of 'Let the woman have it!' that stops all bidding when the one other
woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate
offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious
imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the
bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its
heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground'
scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost
his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates
six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken
contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom,' and, therefore, utterly
vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where
stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and,
shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G--d! Isn't it
grand? Isn't it glorious? 'and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out men,
three in each room of the shanty hotel: 'All meals two dollars. All
drinks thirty-five cents. No washing done here. The manager not
responsible for anything.' Does the bald catalogue of these recitals
leave you cold? It is possible; but it is also possible after three days
in a new town to set the full half of a truck-load of archbishops
fighting for corner lots as they never fought for mitre or crozier.
There is a contagion in a boom as irresistible as that of a panic in a
theatre.
After a while things settle down, and then the carpenter, who is also an
architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to the
highest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.
The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building means
backing your belief in your town--yours to you and peculiarly. Confound
all other towns whatsoever. Behind the crowd of business men the weekly
town paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle. There is
honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good--the employer of
labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse,
savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,'
the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and
invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world
which prefers to live in cities other than Ours.
Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a
patriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few years
later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.
Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was
clapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but
permanent. The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodation
for two hundred guests. The manager who served you in his shirt-sleeves
as his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to be
reminded of the first meeting. Suburban villas more or less adorn the
flats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early
days) hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used to
stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon;
and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends. Then, do
you, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as important, go forth and
patronise things in general, while the manager tells you exactly what
sort of millionaire you would have been if you had 'stayed by the town.'
Or else--the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new made
is dead--dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Success
was not justified by success. Of ten thousand not three hundred remain,
and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel,
with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys are
cold; the villas have no glass in them, and the fire-weed glows in the
centre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the
empty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the stream
that was to have been defiled by the city sewage. A two-pounder lies
fanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the alders
have crept up to the city wall. You pay your money and, more or less,
you take your choice.
By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that go
with a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies in
the gate. He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inward
kernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished. Here
they lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and
Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look. The
adventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dress
a little and altered their employment to suit the world in which they
move. Clive came down from Lobengula's country a few months ago
protesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few that
believed. Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated iron
hut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since then he has altered the map
considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire
is set on ballot-boxes and small lies. The illustrious Don Quixote
to-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has found the
treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. Now and again he destroys black
fellows who hide under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins, with a still
younger Boscawen for his second, was till last year chasing slave-dhows
round Tajurrah; they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be
grilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been holding the
'Republic' of Mexico by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.
The others, big men all and not very much afraid of responsibility, are
selling horses, breaking trails, drinking sangaree, running railways
beyond the timberline, swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and
making cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters of the
world. Only people will not believe this when you tell them. They are
too near things and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the most
cold-blooded realism: 'This is romance. How interesting!' And of
over-handled, thumb-marked realism: 'This is indeed romance!' It is the
next century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our time
clearly.
Meantime this earth of ours--we hold a fair slice of it so far--is full
of wonders and miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default, it
is good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all.