on the top floor--a hall bedroom so form-fitting and cozy that when I
went to bed I always opened the transom to prevent a feeling of
closeness across the chest. If I had as many as three callers in my room
of an evening and one of them got up to go first, the others had to sit
quietly while he was picking out his own legs. But up to the time I
speak of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been there very long and I
hadn't met any of the other boarders socially, except at the table. I
had only what you might call a feeding acquaintance with them.
Christmas Eve came round. I was a thousand miles from home and felt a
million. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a little bit homesick. Anyhow
it was Christmas Eve, and it was snowing outside according to the
orthodox Christmas Eve formula, and upward of five million other people
in New York were getting ready for Christmas without my company,
co-operation or assistance. You'd be surprised to know how lonesome you
can feel in the midst of five million people--until you try it on a
Christmas Eve.
After dinner I went up to my room and sat down with my back against the
door and my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested one elbow in the
washpitcher and put one knee on the mantel and tried to read the
newspapers. The first thing I struck was a Christmas poem, a sentimental
Christmas poem, full of allusions to the family circle, and the old
homestead, and the stockings hanging by the fireplace, and all that sort
of thing.
That was enough. I put on my hat and overcoat and went down into the
street. The snow was coming down in long, slanting lines and the
sidewalks were all white, and where the lamplight shone on them they
looked like the frosting on birthday cakes. People laden with bundles
were diving in and out of all the shops. Every other shop window had a
holly wreath hung in it, and when the doors were opened those spicy
Christmassy smells of green hemlock and pine came gushing out in my
face.
So far as I could tell, everybody in New York--except me--was buying
something for his or her or some other body's Christmas. It was a
tolerably lonesome sensation. I walked two blocks, loitering sometimes
in front of a store. Nobody spoke to me except a policeman. He told me
to keep moving. Finally I went into a little family liquor store.
Strangely enough, considering the season, there was nobody there except
the proprietor. He was reading a German newspaper behind the bar. I
conferred with him concerning the advisability of an egg-nog. He had
never heard of such a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old friends
of mine, named Tom and Jerry, respectively, and he didn't know them
either. So I compromised on a hot lemon toddy. The lemon was one that
had grown up with him in the liquor business, I think, and it wasn't
what you would call a spectacular success as a hot toddy; but it was
warming, anyhow, and that helped. I expanded a trifle. I asked him
whether he wouldn't take something on me.
He took a small glass of beer! He was a foreigner and he probably knew
no better, so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him too harshly. But it
was Christmas Eve and snowing outside--and he took a small beer!
I paid him and came away. I went back to my hall bedroom up on the top
floor and sat down at the window with my face against the pane, like
Little Maggie in the poem.
By now the pavements were two inches deep in whiteness and in the circle
of light around an electric lamp up at the corner of Ninth Avenue I
could see, dimly, the thick, whirling white flakes chasing one another
about madly, playing a Christmas game of their own. Across the way
foot-passengers were still passing in a straggly stream. I heard the
flat clatter of feet upon the stairs outside, heard someone wish
somebody else a Merry Christmas, and heard the other person grunt in a
non-committal sort of way. There was the sound of a hall door slamming
somewhere on my floor. After that there was silence--the kind of
silence that you can break off in chunks and taste.
It continued to snow. I reckon I must have sat there an hour or more.
Down in the street four stories below I heard something--music. I raised
the sash and looked out. An Italian had halted in front of the boarding
house with a grind organ and he was turning the crank and the thing was
playing. It wasn't much of a grind organ as grind organs go. I judge it
must have been the original grind organ that played with Booth and
Barrett. It had lost a lot of its most important works, and it had the
asthma and the heaves and one thing and another the matter with it.
But the tune it was playing was My Old Kentucky Home--and Kentucky was
where I'd come from. The Italian played it through twice, once on his
own hook and once because I went downstairs and divided my money with
him.
I regard that as the finest music I ever heard.
As I was saying before, the classical stuff may do for those who like
it well enough to stand it, but the domestic article suits me. I like
the kind of beer that this man Bach turned out in the spring of the
year, but I don't seem to be able to care much for his music. And so far
as Chopin is concerned, I hope you'll all do your Christmas Chopin
early.
_ART_
[Illustration]
In art as in music I am one who is very easily satisfied. All I ask of a
picture is that it shall look like something, and all I expect of music
is that it shall sound like something.
In this attitude I feel confident that I am one of a group of about
seventy million people in this country, more or less, but only a few of
us, a very heroic few of us, have the nerve to come right out and take a
firm position and publicly express our true sentiments on these
important subjects. Some are under the dominion of strong-minded
wives. Some hesitate to reveal their true artistic leanings for fear of
being called low-browed vulgarians. Some are plastic posers and so
pretend to be something they are not to win the approval of the
ultra-intellectuals. There are only a handful of us who are ready and
willing to go on record as saying where we stand.
[Illustration: "WE LOOKED IN VAIN FOR THE KIND OF PICTURES THAT MOTHER
USED TO MAKE AND FATHER USED TO BUY"]
It is because of this cowardice on the part of the great silent majority
that every year sees us backed farther and farther into a corner. We
walk through miles and miles of galleries, or else we are led through
them by our wives and our friends, and we look in vain for the kind of
pictures that mother used to make and father used to buy. What do we
find? Once in a while we behold a picture of something that we can
recognize without a chart, and it looms before our gladdened vision like
a rock-and-rye in a weary land. But that is not apt to happen often--not
in a 1912-model gallery. In such an establishment one is likely to meet
only Old Masters and Young Messers. If it's an Old Master we probably
behold a Flemish saint or a German saint or an Italian saint--depending
on whether the artist was Flemish or German or Italian--depicted as
being shot full of arrows and enjoying same to the uttermost. If it is a
Young Messer the canvas probably presents to us a view of a poached egg
apparently bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that is what it
looks like to us--a golden buck, forty cents at any good restaurant--in
the act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. But we are informed that
this is an impressionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and we are
expected to stand before it and carry on regardless.
But I for one must positively decline to carry on. This sort of thing
does not appeal to me. I don't want to have to consult the official
catalogue in order to ascertain for sure whether this year's prize
picture is a quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm very peculiar that
way. I like to be able to tell what a picture aims to represent just by
looking at it. I presume this is the result of my early training. I date
back to the Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior Decorating. In a
considerable degree I am still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctly
recall the time when upon the walls of every wealthy home of America
there hung, among other things, two staple oil paintings--a still-life
for the dining room, showing a dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral for
the parlor, showing a collection of cows drinking out of a purling
brook. A dead fish with a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not a
thing you would care to have around the house for any considerable
period of time, except in a picture, and the same was true of cows.
People who could not abide the idea of a cow in the kitchen gladly
welcomed one into the parlor when painted in connection with the above
purling brook and several shade trees.
Those who could not afford oil paintings went in for steel engravings
and chromos--good reliable brands, such as the steel engraving of Henry
Clay's Farewell to the American Senate and the Teaching Baby to Waltz
art chromo. War pictures were also very popular back in that period. If
it were a Northern household you could be pretty sure of seeing a work
entitled Gettysburg, showing three Union soldiers, two plain and one
colored, in the act of repulsing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southern
household there would be one that had been sold on subscription by a
strictly non-partisan publishing house in Charleston, South Carolina,
and guaranteed to be historically correct in all particulars,
representing Robert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a palmetto tree, while
in the background were a large number of deceased Northern invaders
neatly racked up like cordwood.
Such things as these were a part of the art education of our early
youth. Along with them we learned to value the family photograph album,
which fastened with a latch like a henhouse door, and had a nap on it
like a furred tongue, and contained, among other treasures, the
photograph of our Uncle Hiram wearing his annual collar.
And there were also enlarged crayon portraits in heavy gold frames with
red plush insertions, the agent having thrown in the portraits in
consideration of our taking the frames; and souvenirs of the
Philadelphia Centennial; and wooden scoop shovels heavily gilded by hand
with moss roses painted on the scoop part and blue ribbon bows to hang
them up by; and on the what-not in the corner you were reasonably
certain of finding a conch shell with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it;
and if you held the shell up to your young ear you could hear the
murmur of the sea just as plain as anything. Of course you could secure
the same murmuring effect by holding an old-fashioned tin cuspidor up to
your ear, too, but in this case the poetic effect would have been
lacking. And, besides, there were other uses for the cuspidor.
Almost the only Old Masters with whose works we were well acquainted
were John L. Sullivan and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey. But Rosa Bonheur's
Horse Fair suited us clear down to the ground--her horses looked like
real horses, even if they were the kind that haul brewery wagons; and in
the matter of sculpture Powers' Greek Slave seemed to fill the bill to
the satisfaction of all. Anthony Comstock and the Boston Purity League
had not taken charge of our art as yet, and nobody seemed to find any
fault because the Greek lady looked as though she'd slipped on the top
step and come down just as she was, wearing nothing to speak of except a
pair of handcuffs. Nobody did speak of it either--not in a mixed company
anyhow.
Furniture was preferred when it was new--the newer the better. We went
in for golden oak and for bird's eye maple, depending on whether we
liked our furniture to look tanned or freckled; and when the careful
housekeeper threw open her parlor for a social occasion, such as a
funeral, the furniture gave off a splendid new sticky smell, similar to
a paint and varnish store on a hot day. The vogue for antiques hadn't
got started yet; that was to descend upon us later on. We rather liked
the dining-room table to have all its legs still, and the bureau to have
drawers that could be opened without blasting. In short, that was the
period of our national life when only the very poor had to put up with
decrepit second-hand furniture, as opposed to these times when only the
very rich can afford to own it. If you have any doubts regarding this
last assertion of mine I should advise you to drop into any reliable
antique shop and inquire the price of a mahogany sideboard suffering
from tetter and other skin diseases, or a black walnut cupboard with
doors that froze up solid about the time of the last Seminole War. I
suppose these things go in cycles--in fact, I'm sure they do. Some day
the bare sight of the kind of furniture which most people favor nowadays
will cause a person of artistic sensibilities to burst into tears, just
as the memory of the things that everybody liked twenty-five or thirty
years ago gives such poignant pain to so many at present.
Even up to the time of the World's Fair quite a lot of people still
favored the simpler and more understandable forms of art expression. We
went to Chicago and religiously visited the Art Building, and in our
nice new creaky shoes we walked past miles and miles of brought-on
paintings by foreign artists, whose names we could not pronounce, in
order to find some sentimental domestic subject. After we had found it
we would stand in front of it for hours on a stretch with the tears
rolling down our cheeks. Some of us wept because the spirit of the
picture moved us, and some because our poor tired feet hurt us and the
picture gave us a good excuse for crying in public, and so we did
so--freely and openly. Grant if you will that our taste was crude and
raw and provincial, yet we knew what we liked and the bulk of us weren't
ashamed to say so, either. What we liked was a picture or a statue which
remotely at least resembled the thing that it was presumed to represent.
Likewise we preferred pictures of things that we ourselves knew about
and could understand.
Maybe it was because of that early training that a good many of us have
never yet been able to work up much enthusiasm over the Old Masters.
Mind you, we have no quarrel with those who become incoherent and
babbling with joy in the presence of an Old Master, but--doggone
'em!--they insist on quarreling with us because we think differently. We
fail to see anything ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered,
cracked, crumbling painting of an early Christian martyr on a grill,
happily frying on one side like an egg--a picture that looks as though
the Old Master painted it some morning before breakfast, when he wasn't
feeling the best in the world, and then wore it as a liver pad for forty
or fifty years. We cannot understand why they love the Old Masters so,
and they cannot understand why we prefer the picture of Custer's Last
Stand that the harvesting company used to give away to advertise its
mowing machines.
Once you get away from the early settlers among the Old Masters the
situation becomes different. Rembrandt and Hals painted some portraits
that appeal deeply to the imagination of nearly all of my set. The
portraits which they painted not only looked like regular persons, but
so far as my limited powers of observation go, they were among the few
painters of Dutch subjects who didn't always paint a windmill or two
into the background. It probably took great resolution and
self-restraint, but they did it and I respect them for it.
I may say that I am also drawn to the kind of ladies that Gainsborough
and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted. They certainly turned out some mighty
good-looking ladies in those days, and they were tasty dressers, too,
and I enjoy looking at their pictures. Coming down the line a little
farther, I want to state that there is also something very
fascinating in those soft-boiled pink ladies, sixteen hands high, with
sorrel manes, that Bouguereau did; and the soldier pictures of
Meissonier and Detaille appeal to me mightily. Their soldiers are always
such nice neat soldiers, and they never have their uniforms mussed up or
their accouterments disarranged, even when they are being shot up or cut
down or something. Corot and Rousseau did some landscapes that seem to
approximate the real thing, and there are several others whose names
escape me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish to say that this is
about as far as I can go at this writing. I must admit that I have never
been held spellbound and enthralled for hours on a stretch by a
contemplation of the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To me she seems
merely a lady smiling about something--simply that and nothing more.
[Illustration: "THE INSCRUTABLE SMILE OF A SALESLADY WOULD MAKE MONA
LISA SEEM A MERE AMATEUR"]
Any woman can smile inscrutably; that is one of the specialties of the
sex. The inscrutable smile of a saleslady in an exclusive Fifth Avenue
shop when a customer asks to look at something a little cheaper would
make Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur as an inscrutable smiler. Quite a
number of us remained perfectly calm when some gentlemen stole Miss Lisa
out of the Louvre, and we expect to remain equally calm if she is never
restored.
As I said before, our little band is shrinking in numbers day by day.
The population as a whole are being educated up to higher ideals in art.
On the wings of symbolism and idealism they are soaring ever higher and
higher, until a whole lot of them must be getting dizzy in the head by
now.
First, there was the impressionistic school, which started it; and then
there was the post-impressionistic school, suffering from the same
disease but in a more violent form; and here just recently there have
come along the Cubists and the Futurists.
[Illustration: "A PERSON WHO FOR REASONS BEST KNOWN TO THE POLICE HAS
NOT BEEN LOCKED UP"]
You know about the Cubists? A Cubist is a person who for reasons best
known to the police has not been locked up yet, who asserts that all
things in Nature, living and inanimate, properly resolve themselves into
cubes. What is more, he goes and paints pictures to prove it--pictures
of cubic waterfalls pouring down cubic precipices, and cubic ships
sailing on cubic oceans, and cubic cows being milked by cubic milkmaids.
He makes portraits, too--portraits of persons with cubic hands and cubic
feet, who are smoking cubed cigarettes and have solid cubiform heads. On
that last proposition we are with them unanimously; we will concede that
there are people in this world with cube-shaped heads, they being the
people who profess to enjoy this style of picture.
A Futurist begins right where a Cubist leaves off, and gets worse. The
Futurists have already had exhibitions in Paris and London and last
Spring they invaded New York. They call themselves art anarchists. Their
doctrine is a simple and a cheerful one--they merely preach that
whatever is normal is wrong. They not only preach it, they practice it.
Here are some of their teachings:
"We teach the plunge into shadowy death under the white set eyes of the
ideal!
"The mind must launch the flaming body, like a fire-ship, against the
enemy, the eternal enemy that, if he do not exist, must be invented!
"The victory is ours--I am sure of it, for the maniacs are already
hurling their hearts to heaven like bombs! Attention! Fire! Our blood?
Yes! All our blood in torrents to redye the sickly auroras of the earth!
Yes, and we shall also be able to warm thee within our smoking arms, O
wretched, decrepit, chilly Sun, shivering upon the summit of the
Gorisankor!"
[Illustration: "COLLISION BETWEEN TWO HEAVENLY BODIES OR PREMATURE
EXPLOSION OF A CUSTARD PIE"]
There you have the whole thing, you see, simply, dispassionately and
quietly presented. Most of us have seen newspaper reproductions of the
best examples of the Futurists' school. As well as a body can judge from
these reproductions, a Futurist's method of execution must be
comparatively simple. After looking at his picture, you would say that
he first put on a woolly overcoat and a pair of overshoes; that he then
poured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato catsup, liquid bluing, burnt
cork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs over
himself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a large
tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, the
result being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between Two
Heavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or something
else equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite a number of
converts in this country, especially among those advanced lovers of art
who are beginning to realize that the old impressionistic school lacked
emphasis and individuality in its work. But I expect to stand firm, and
when everybody else nearly is a Futurist and is tearing down Sargent's
pictures and Abbey's and Whistler's to make room for immortal Young
Messers, I and a few others will still be holding out resolutely to the
end.
At such times as these I fain would send my thoughts back longingly to
an artist who flourished in the town where I was born and brought up. He
was practically the only artist we had, but he was versatile in the
extreme. He was several kinds of a painter rolled into one--house, sign,
portrait, landscape, marine and wagon. In his lighter hours, when
building operations were dull, he specialized in oil paintings of life
and motion--mainly pictures of horse races and steamboat races. When he
painted a horse race, the horses were always shown running neck and neck
with their mouths wide open and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrils
were widely extended and painted a deep crimson, and their legs were
neatly arranged just so, and not scrambled together in any old fashion,
as seems to be the case with the legs of the horses that are being
painted nowadays. And when he painted a steamboat race it would always
be the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee coming down the river abreast in
the middle of the night, with the darkies dancing on the lower decks and
heavy black smoke rolling out of the smokestacks in four distinct
columns--one column to each smokestack--and showers of sparks belching
up into the vault of night.
There was action for you--action and attention to detail. With this
man's paintings you could tell a horse from a steamboat at a glance. He
was nothing of an impressionist; he never put smokestacks on the
horse nor legs on the steamboat. And his work gave general satisfaction
throughout that community.
Frederic Remington wasn't any impressionist either; and so far as I can
learn he didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When Remington painted an
Indian on a pony it was a regular Indian and a regular pony--not one of
those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on
to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on
the pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your
nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch the
play of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a
charter member of a league of Americans who believe that Frederic
Remington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old Master that
ever turned out blistered saints and fly-blown cherubim. And if every
one who secretly thinks the same way about it would only join in--of
course they wouldn't, but if they would--we'd be strong enough to elect
a president on a platform calling for a prohibitive tariff against the
foreign-pauper-labor Old Masters of Europe.
While we were about it our league could probably do something in the
interests of sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded person that
sculpture has been very much overdone in this country. It seems to us
there should be a law against perpetuating any of our great men in
marble or bronze or stone or amalgam fillings until after he has been
dead a couple of hundred years, and by that time a fresh crop ought to
be coming on and probably we shall have lost the desire to create such
statues.
A great man who cannot live in the affectionate and grateful memories of
his fellow countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up statues of him;
that, however, is not the main point.