IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I
used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his
plans.
They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the
ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and
provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions
of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now
live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated ugliness.
"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost
inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away--I want to make 'em
hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he
would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby
black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the
fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.
"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested
with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a surprised
glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in
which we sat.
His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of black
walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his
guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson
carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the Niagara--the
Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty
years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of which he passed
for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and a poem had once
been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty "On a picture in
the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."
Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit old
Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in
the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only
in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs.
Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little
pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the _Art Journal:_ "Paul
will know how to appreciate your father's treasures."
In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard, was
sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which
nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact
early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many
painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching
enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had
revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their
dissemination.
He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis, and
the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.
"It _is_ an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the library
for the first time.
The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights
with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn
thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of
ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand representing a
Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a palm-tree.
"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon, "old
Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's too
stingy."
Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that, my
dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close to
him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."
The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the library,
and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour of a
superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round for a
decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old things,
especially when they've done good service, but I see now that this is
too monstrous--"
"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it _is_
a little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."
Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a table
of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent--the plainest
mahogany--under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and pretended
not to notice that I was taking out my own cigar.
"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as if
you had to live on a book-keeper's salary, with a large family to
support."
He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I know--I
know--that's all very well. But for twenty tables that I _don't_ buy I
can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."
"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the writing-table
was never bought. The library remained as it was, and so did the
contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this inconsistent
acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's part, to a
congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to a real
unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside his point
of vision.
"But he owned that the table was ugly," I agreed.
"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll
wager he became unconscious of it again as soon as your back was
turned."
"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up his
mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."
"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than insensible
to ugliness. But the truth is that he doesn't mind the table and is
used to it. He knows his way about the drawers."
"But he could get another with the same number of drawers."
"Too much trouble," argued Halidon.
"Too much money," I persisted.
"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three
travelling scholarships and be planning this big Academy of Arts?"
"Well, he's mean to himself, at any rate."
"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!"
Halidon exclaimed with one of his great flushes of enthusiasm.
But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and
Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a trifling foible compared to his
altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help
observing, as time went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning to
impede the execution of his schemes of art-philanthropy. The three
travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of his
ardour, and before the personal management of his property had awakened
in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital
accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest
began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a gradual arrest in
the practical development of his plan.
"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I believe
he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less newspaper," Halidon grumbled
affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of the quick
revivals of optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to his spirit,
"after all, it makes one admire him all the more when one sees such a
nature condemned to be at war with the petty inherited instinct of
greed."
Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great
project of the Academy of Arts should languish on paper long after all
its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction of the
projector, and of the expert advisers he had called in council.
"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry--to take advice and compare
ideas and points of view--to collect and classify his material in
advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine about Paul's
perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting for So-and-so's
report; "but now that the plan's mature--and _such_ a plan! You'll
grant it's magnificent?--I should think he'd burn to see it carried
out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm cools and the
whole business turns stale on his hands."
That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a frugal
walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed refreshed by
his respite from business cares and from the interminable revision of
his cherished scheme; while contact with the concrete manifestations of
beauty had, as usual, renewed his flagging ardour.
"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long
gaze at one of those big things--picture or church or statue--I kept
saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such a
sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it
better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or carve or build, than
to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by yourself?'"
"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when is
the foundation stone to be laid?"