young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in
upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more
strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style
is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The
pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect
with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely
upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding
and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and
sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a
bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and
entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make
permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which
there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of
revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken
first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the
only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.
The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of
Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of
struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for
the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really
serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs.
Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration,
barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature
of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these
years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has
called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so
convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its
insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.
Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive
delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the
young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian
standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and
refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those
still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her
pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these
groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the
touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces
and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and
streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to
their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of
harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be
quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the
quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk
in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities
as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon
seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to
us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of
hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her
simple and engaging conversation.
Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric
delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of
gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in
this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible
one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so
far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices
softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have
endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and
it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in
this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be
remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of
course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have
survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period,
however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been
exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour
of human life.
We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through
similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park
inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy
and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless
greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal
issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of
the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so
imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them
with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous
experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in
quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her
revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of
revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us
all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.
I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they
seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender
hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge
chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you
do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as
prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men
and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome
boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus
and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs.
Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain
homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if
such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is
still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can
think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic
history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that
has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.
Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her
professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and
she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the
intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a
fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her
disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of
instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need
of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and
satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate
Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will
have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by
her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic
comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention
will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of
praise and congratulations.
Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since
jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to
refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly
unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau,
Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their
handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art
experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely
for their revelations, and there is always present in these
unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts
for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of
mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the
outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal
visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their
genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for
interpretation.
HENRI ROUSSEAU
Not long since, we heard much of naïveté--it was the fashion among the
schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the
work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of
means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie--it was fashionable
to draw naïvely, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a
highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a
certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the
unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was
obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the
prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a
time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often
respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly
involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and
helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may
expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the
great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact
with subject.
We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional
in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was
not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naïveté
such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real
phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to
call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true
part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and
need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them
in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not
haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly
not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these
traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that
with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same
sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The
single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its
special relationship to the time in which it is being produced,
explicitly of this age.
What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and
have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise
blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or
freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially
of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this
period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period
striving toward a more vigorous type of values--something as beautiful
as the machinery of our time--it is not as yet to any great degree
cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has
destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to
focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not
visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle
was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly
among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child,
Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naïve and
childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.
If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as
painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable
that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in
all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent:
to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal
life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially
always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes
or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them
covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places,
somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences
of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the
latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris
herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his
home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de
Perelle where he lived.
In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of
the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the
examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the
sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of
directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image
chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of
himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange
springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not
mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if
he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element
himself.
It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out
after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside
the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty
upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous
quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there
was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that
he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint
inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil
drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting
to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of
her, to be disclosed at every hedge.
If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal,
meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris
at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy,
pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of
his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and
greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which
predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way
toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their
profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of
peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in
his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which
were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naïveté, without
struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following
diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images
that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his
imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity
for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of
quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is
sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the
machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with
itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it,
living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures,
occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in
them.
There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of
this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his
methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the
declarations of Jacob Boehme--they are the songs of innocence and
experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have
about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet
reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true
and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme
simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that
characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and
consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a
mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an
untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no
falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have
detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first
contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a
very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.
That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his
compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France
are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and voice,
and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We,
who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's
beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for
delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long
before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the
exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from
remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in
design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject.
Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein
lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and
brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the
elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled
with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers
peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all
excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders
and finds itself so much at home.
"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is
lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete
with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of
form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of
the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are
that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming and
lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting
his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop
around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be
considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who
believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of
whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of
sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes,
touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so
simple and untutored person.
The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if
only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying
naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched,
he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all
that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for
Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for
him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the
real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled,
and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open
another door for the world's weary eye.
PART TWO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
Where is our once charming acrobat--our minstrel of muscular music?
What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in
silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and
their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has
dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times
that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the
charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since
popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst?
It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to
myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real
variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying
much for him these days, and for his charming type of art.
What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack
wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by
means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the
various types of melodic muscular virtuosity?
We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg
which is usually called dancing; and that is excellent among us here,
quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of
this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers
but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our
acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing
with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a
happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of
acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed
for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or
two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with
our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as
witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and
"Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself
might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic
gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race,
artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to
my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the
animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot
follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing
rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them
with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.
How can one forget, for instance, the Famille Bouvier who used to
appear regularly at the fêtes in the streets of Paris in the summer
season, living all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom of
these fête people. What a charming moment it was always to see the
simple but well built Mlle. Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart
and beautifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong,
broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on one hand upright in
the air. It was a classic moment in the art of the acrobat,
interesting to watch the father of them all training the fragile
bodies of the younger boys and girls to the systematic movement of the
business while the mother sat in the doorway of the caravan nursing
the youngest at the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. And
how charming it was to look in at the doors of these little houses on
wheels and note the excellent domestic order of them, most always with
a canary or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one cat or
dog or maybe both. This type is the progenitor of our stage acrobat,
it is the primitive stage of these old-time troubadours, and it is
still prevalent in times of peace in France. The strong man gotten in
tawdry pink tights and much worn black velvet with his very elaborate
and drawn out speeches, in delicate French, concerning the marvels of
his art and the long wait for the stipulated number of _dix centimes_
pieces before his marvellous demonstration could begin. This is, so to
say, the vagabond element of our type of entertainment, the wandering
minstrel who keeps generation after generation to the art of his
forefathers, this fine old art of the pavement and the open country
road. But we look for our artist in vain these days, those groups
whose one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the human body,
concerted muscular melody. We cannot find him on the street in the
shade of a stately chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at
least twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our modern music hall.