The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a
Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an
American capital when the first House of Representatives held its
deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the
State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its
charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline
is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families
in California.
Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which
the soil has changed-hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and
landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold
themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of
their ancient air.
The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were
watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by
fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short
sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for
they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could
tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for
the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new
a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely
rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the
heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a
graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the
chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.
There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat
almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the _Cornhill_
illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s _Erema_, and see all the characters
astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a
rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a thing unknown in all
the rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey,
you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding—men always at
the hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory
spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face
in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are
surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure
Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian,
although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all
the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to
find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of
deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and
decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the
most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose
into his hat-band. Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear
the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the
streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that
language for an occasion. The only communications in which the
population joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes
in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night
after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a
company and with several instruments and voice together, sometimes
severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar
accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount
into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that
high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human but altogether sad.
The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all
the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the
same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were
selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to him. You would ask him
how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from
which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men,
and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact. Their
merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former
landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with
the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in a
way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they
have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay, suppose them to
observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from
delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I
have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of
his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken
in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that
he had seen a lawyer, would have “been like doubting his word.” The
scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to
understand all business as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to
be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of
agreements. This single unworldly trait will account for much of that
revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the name of being
great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts both ways. In a
contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed into
the hands of the more scupulous race.
Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how
far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is, of course, but
a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being
solved in the various States of the American Union. I am reminded of an
anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were
purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The
agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what
possible use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. “And what,” he asked, “do you
propose to call this?” “I’m no very sure,” replied the grocer, “but I
think it’s going to turn out port.” In the older Eastern States, I think
we may say that this hotch-potch of races in going to turn out English,
or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones.
The elements are differently mingled in the south, in what we may call
the Territorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast.
Above all, in these last, we may look to see some monstrous
hybrid—Whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original
and all their own. In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down
to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a
Mexican, and a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from
Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese;
and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign
land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race contributes
something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of
California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium.
And chief among these influences is that of the Mexicans.
The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. They still preserve a
sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to
themselves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops
being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of
California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in her
streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there, there
occurred two reputed murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not
possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these
reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some
suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an
instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of
course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in
this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed
not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the traditions of their
own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly Mexicanised.
Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost
entirely in their business transactions upon each other’s worthless
paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally
penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in
these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing
but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to
asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when they
are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you
mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising
chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness
of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican
tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for
the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous
habit of living upon “tick” has grown into Californian nature. I do not
mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax
as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State
expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a
thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the
advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into
irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave
hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may
see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had
formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the
race that holds and tills it for the moment.
In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new
county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is
held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another
legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace of
California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth. We
have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which
flow from the existence of these large landholders—land-thieves,
land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called.
Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How
they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or
wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been
repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen
thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say,
he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him
warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death
by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well
known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English
readers. Originally an Irish dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad
language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there
for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and
conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed
by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own
ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and
had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the
hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his
fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against Chinese
labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his one
articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to “hang David Jacks.” Had the
town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been done
years ago. Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the West,
and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a
competition of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and
his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.
On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old
friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in
year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in
supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where
labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which
explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue
Kearney.
In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers
of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by
the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with
chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by
many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and
at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,
passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye
embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous
sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has
gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to
care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous,
sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,
daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to
preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been
its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a
headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So
it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was told,
are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor,
and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of
Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the
_padre_ drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is
the only covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and
decorated for the service; the Indians troop together, their bright
dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God
served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple
under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years of age,
conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the
Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin so
correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. “In
sæcula sæculoho-horum,” they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every
additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with
joy than the faces of these Indian singers. It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better
days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art
and letters was united and expressed. And it made a man’s heart sorry
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to
read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from
all authority and influence in that land—to be succeeded by greedy
land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may our
Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of
Jesus.
But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in
this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no
longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three
sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes
figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is
advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway
stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little town!
it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting
caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of
Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire
vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.
[1880.]
III
FONTAINEBLEAU
VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS
I
THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that people
love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence,
the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the
great age and dignity of certain groves—these are but ingredients, they
are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative; the air, the
light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.
The artist may be idle and not fear the “blues.” He may dally with his
life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of
the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most
smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the
plain of Biére, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of
fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in
the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria.
There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their
youth, or the old better contented with their age.
The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country
to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still
raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art—Millet who
loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped
in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day of that
strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the
culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures—that voluntary aversion
of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful effects—that
disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint
the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.
And for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France scenery
incomparable for romance and harmony. Provence, and the valley of the
Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of masterpieces waiting
for the brush. The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a
tale to the imagination, and surprises while it charms. Here you shall
see castellated towns that would befit the scenery of dreamland; streets
that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite
proportions; flowers of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.
All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door
of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in
Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But one
thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to paint and in
whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell among graceful
shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classically
graceful; and though the student may look for different qualities, this
quality, silently present, will educate his hand and eye.
But, before all its other advantages—charm, loveliness, or proximity to
Paris—comes the great fact that it is already colonised. The institution
of a painters’ colony is a work of time and tact. The population must be
conquered. The innkeeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to welcome as a favoured
guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage
beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his
faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow
money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour
merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given to the
place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should find himself
alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome, than fresh
perils spring up upon the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist
are knocking at the gate. This is the crucial moment for the colony. If
these intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom and amenity;
pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they will have undone the
education of the innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the
poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. “Not here, O
Apollo!” will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St.
Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying are the
shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the
cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but
at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him
licence. Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do
the honours of his village generously. Any artist is made welcome,
through whatever medium he may seek expression; science is respected;
even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon
begin to find himself at home. And when that essentially modern
creature, the English or American girl-student, began to walk calmly into
his favourite inns as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter
owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French
respectability, quite as precise as ours, though covering different
provinces of life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls
were painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he hounded
from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.
This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads
are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they
are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much
occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and
this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at the
trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else,
is, for awhile at least, the king’s highway of progress. Here, in
England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among
the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent,
prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this
is the lad’s ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade.
The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love
of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation
of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and
even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with
his material as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a
second stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; that is
his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really grow beyond
it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business of real art—to
give life to abstractions and significance and charm to facts. In the
meanwhile, let him dwell much among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can
take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of
these years. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the
dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal
painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on.
They will say, “Why do you not write a great book? paint a great
picture?” If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to
the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style
falsified for life.
And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art
is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the
midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest scholar
is conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer
to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.
But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up,
put a violence upon his will, and, for better or worse, begin the
business of creation. This evil day there is a tendency continually to
postpone: above all with painters. They have made so many studies that
it has become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush
with them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages;
in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to call them
“Snoozers.” Continual returns to the city, the society of men farther
advanced, the study of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing
is to be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the means of
treatment. It will be time enough to think of curing the malady after it
has been caught; for to catch it is the very thing for which you seek
that dream-land of the painters’ village. “Snoozing” is a part of the
artistic education; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else
being forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.
Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very
air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, clarity,
the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling,
apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere
residence; or if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated. The
air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave that
airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to
change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from
the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are
still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be
decorative in its emptiness.