Part 9

We are attributing very trivial and vulgar motives to the woman, and it may be, after all, that she married for love in spite of the title, and not on account of it. But if these are love-matches, it would surely sometimes happen that the American men, in their turn, would fall in love with foreign women of title, and that we would hear of impecunious princesses and countesses hunting through the States for rich brokers and wheat-dealers. Of course the obvious answer to this is that the American women are so much more attractive than the men that they appeal to people of all nations and of every rank, and that American men are content to take them without the title.

The rich fathers of the young girls who are sacrificed should go into the business with a more accurate knowledge of what they are buying. Even the shrewdest of them--men who could not be misled into buying a worthless railroad or an empty mine--are frequently imposed upon in these speculations. The reason is that while they have made a study of the relative values and the soundness of railroads and mines, they have not taken the pains to study this question of titles, and as long as a man is a count or a prince, they inquire no further, and one of them buys him for his daughter on his face value. There should be a sort of Bradstreet for these rich parents, which they could consult before investing so much money plus a young girl's happiness. There are, as a matter of fact, only a very few titles worth buying, and in selecting the choice should always lie between one of England and one of Germany. An English earl is the best the American heiress can reasonably hope for, and after him a husband with a German title is very desirable. These might be rated as "sure" and "safe" investments.

But these French titles created by Napoleon, or the Italians, with titles created by the Papal Court, and the small fry of other countries, are really not worth while. Theirs are not titles; as some one has said, they are epitaphs; and the best thing to do with the young American girl who thinks she would like to be a princess is to take her abroad early in her life, and let her meet a few other American girls who have become princesses. After that, if she still wants to buy a prince and pay his debts and supply him with the credit to run into more debt, she has only herself to blame, and goes into it with her pretty eyes wide open. It will be then only too evident that she is fitted for nothing higher.

On no one class of visitor does Paris lay her spell more heavily than on the American art student. For, no matter where he has studied at home, or under what master, he finds when he reaches Paris so much that is new and beautiful and full of inspiration that he becomes as intolerant as are all recent converts, and so happy in his chosen profession that he looks upon everything else than art with impatience and contempt. As art is something about which there are many opinions, he too often passes rapidly on to the stage when he can see nothing to admire in any work save that which the master that he worships declares to be true, and he scorns every other form of expression and every other school and every other artist.

You almost envy the young man his certainty of mind and the unquestionableness of his opinion. He will take you through the Salon at a quick step, demolishing whole walls of pictures as he goes with a sweeping gesture of the hand, and will finally bring you breathless before a little picture, or a group of them, which, so he informs you, are the only ones in the exhibition worthy of consideration. And on the day following a young disciple of another school will escort you through the same rooms, and regard with pitying contempt the pictures which your friend of the day before has left standing, and will pick out somewhere near the roof a strange monstrosity, beneath which he will stand with bowed head, and upon which he will comment in a whisper.

It is an amusing pose, and most bewildering to a philistine like myself when he finds all the artists whom he had venerated denounced as photographers and decorators, or story-tellers and illustrators. I used to be quite ashamed of the ignorance which had left me so long unenlightened as to what was true and beautiful.

These boys have, perhaps, an aunt in Kansas City, or a mother in Lynn, Massachusetts, who is saving and pinching to send them fifteen or twenty dollars a week so that they can learn to be great painters, and they have not been in Paris a week before they have changed their entire view of art, and adopted a new method and a new master and a new religion. It is nowise derogatory to a boy to be supported by a fond aunt in Kansas City, who sends him fifteen dollars a week and the news of the social life of that place, but it is amusing to think how she and his cousins in the West would be awed if they heard him damn a picture by waving his thumb in the air at it, and saying, "It has a little too much of that," with a downward sweep of the thumb, "and not enough of this," with an upward sweep. For one hardly expects a youth who is still at Julien's, and who has not yet paid the first quarter's rent for his studio, to proclaim all the first painters of France as only fit to color photographs. It is as if some one were to say, "You can take away all of the books of the Boston Library and nothing will be lost, but spare three volumes of sonnets written by the only great writer of the present time, who is a friend of mine, and of whom no one knows but myself."

Of course one must admire loyalty of that sort, for when it is loyalty to an idea it cannot help but be fine and sometimes noble, though it is a trifle amusing as well. It is just this tenacity of belief in one's own work, and just this intolerance of the work of others, that make Paris inspiring. A man cannot help but be in earnest, if he amounts to anything at all, when on every side he hears his work attacked or vaunted to the skies. As long as the question asked is "Is it art?" and not "Will it sell?" and "Is it popular?" the influence must be for good.

These students, in their loyalty to the particular school they admire, of course proclaim their belief in every public and private place, and are ever on their guard, but it is in their studios that they have set up their gods and established their doctrines most firmly.

One of these young men, whom I had known at college, took me to his studio last summer, and asked me to tell him how I liked it. It was a most embarrassing question to me, for to my untrained eye the rooms seemed to be stricken with poverty, and so bare as to appear untenanted. I said, at last, that he had a very fine view from his windows.

"Yes, but you say nothing of the room itself," he protested; "and I have spent so much time and thought on it. I have been a year and a half in arranging this room."

"But there is nothing in it," I objected; "you couldn't have taken a year and a half to arrange these things. There is not enough of them. It shouldn't have taken more than half an hour."

He smiled with a sweet, superior smile, and shook his head at me. "I am afraid," he said, "that you are one of those people who like studios filled with tapestries and armor and palms and huge, hideous chests of carved wood. You are probably the sort of person who would hang a tennis-racket on his wall and consider it decorative. _We_ believe in lines and subdued colors and broad, bare surfaces. There is nothing in this room that has not a meaning of its own. You are quite right; there is very little in it; but what is here could not be altered or changed without spoiling the harmony of the whole, and nothing in it could be replaced or improved upon."

I regarded the studio with renewed interest at this, and took a mental inventory of its contents for my own improvement. I was guiltily conscious that once at college I had placed two lacrosse-sticks over my doorway, and what made it worse was that I did not play lacrosse, and that they had been borrowed from the man up-stairs for decorative purposes solely. I hoped my artist friend would not question me too closely. His room had a bare floor and gray walls and a green door. There was a long, low bookcase, and a straight-legged table, on which stood, ranged against the wall, a blue and white jar, a gold Buddha, and a jade bottle. On one wall hung a gray silk poke-bonnet, of the fashion of the year 1830, and on another an empty gold frame. With the exception of three chairs there was nothing else in the room. I moved slightly, and with the nervous fear that if I disturbed or disarranged anything the bare gray walls might fall in on me. And then I asked him why he did not put a picture in his frame.

"Ah, exactly!" he exclaimed, triumphantly; "that shows exactly what you are; you are an American philistine. You cannot see that a picture is a beautiful thing in itself, and that a dead-gold frame with its four straight lines is beautiful also; but together they might not be beautiful. That gray wall needs a spot on it, and so I hung that gold frame there, not because it was a frame, but because it was beautiful; for the same reason I hung that eighteen-thirty bonnet on the other wall. The two grays harmonize. People do not generally hang bonnets on walls, but that is because they regard them as things of use, and not as things of beauty."

I pointed with my stick at the three lonely ornaments on the solitary table. "Then if you were to put the blue and white jar on the right of the Buddha, instead of on the left," I asked, "the whole room would feel the shock?"

"Of course," answered my friend. "Can't even you see that?"

I tried to see it, but I could not. I had only just arrived in Paris.

There was another artist with a studio across the bridges, and his love of art cost him much money and some severe trials. His suite of rooms was all in blue, gray, white, and black. He said that if you looked at things in the world properly, you would see that they were all gray, blue, or black. He had painted a gray lady in a gray dress, with a blue parrot on her shoulder. She had brown lips and grayish teeth. He was very much disappointed in me when I told him that lips always looked to me either pink or red. He explained by saying that my eyes were not trained properly. I resented this, and told him that my eyes were as good as his own, and that a recruiting officer had once tested them with colored yarns and letters of the alphabet held up in inaccessible corners, and had given me a higher mark for eyesight than for anything else. He said it was not a question of colored yarns; and that while I might satisfy a recruiting sergeant that I could distinguish an ammunition train from a travelling circus, it did not render me a critic on art matters. He pointed out that the eyes of the women in the Caucasus who make rugs are trained to distinguish a hundred and eighty different shades of colors that other eyes cannot see; and in time, he added, I would see that everything in real life looked flat and gray. I took a red carnation out of my coat, and put it over the gray lady's lips, and asked him whether he would call it gray or red, and he said that was no argument.

He suffered a great deal in his efforts to live up to his ideas, but assured me that he was much happier than I in my ignorance of what was beautiful. He explained, for instance, that he would like to put up some of the photographs of his family that he had brought with him around his room, but that he could not do it, because photographs were so undecorative. So he kept them in his trunk. He also kept a green cage full of doves because they were gray and white and decorative, and in spite of the fact that they were a nuisance, and always flying away, and being caught again by small boys, who brought them back, and wanted a franc for so doing. He suffered, too, in his inability to find the shade of blue for his chair covers that would harmonize with the rest of his room. He covered the furniture five times, and never successfully, and hence the cushions of his lounge and stiff chairs were still as white as when they had last gone to the upholsterer's.

These young men are friends of mine, and I am sure they will not object to my describing their ateliers, of which they were very proud. They believed in their own schools, and in their own ways of looking at art, and no one could laugh or argue them out of it; consequently they deserved credit for the faith that was in them. They are chiefly interesting here as showing how a young man will develop in the artistic atmosphere of Paris. It is only when he ceases to develop, and sinks into the easy lethargy of a life of pleasure there, that he becomes uninteresting.

There was still another young man whom I knew there who can serve here now as an example of the American who stops in Paris too long.

I first met this artist at a garden-party, and he asked me if I did not think it dull, and took me for a walk up to Montmartre, talking all the way of what a great and beautiful mother Paris was to those who worked there. His home was in Maine, and he let me know, without reflecting on his native town, that he had been choked and cramped there, and that his life had been the life of a Siberian exile. Here he found people who could understand; here, the very statues and buildings gave him advice and encouragement; here were people who took him and his work seriously, and who helped him on to fresh endeavors, and who made work a delight.

"I have one picture in the Salon," he said, flushing with proper pride and pleasure, "and one has just gone to the World's Fair, and another has received an honorable mention at Munich. That's pretty good for my first year, is it not? And I'm only twenty-five years old now," he added, with his eyes smiling into the future at the great things he was to do. Nobody could resist the contagion of his enthusiasm and earnestness of purpose.

He was painting the portrait of some rich man's daughter at the time, and her family took a patronizing interest in him, and said it was a pity that he did not go out more into society and get commissions. They asked me to tell him to be more careful about his dress, and to suggest to him not to wear a high hat with a sack-coat. I told them to leave him alone, and not to worry about his clothes, or to suggest his running after people who had pretty daughters and money enough to have them painted. These people would run after him soon enough, if he went on as he had begun.

When I saw him on the boulevards the next summer he had to reintroduce himself; he was very smartly dressed, in a cheap way, and he was sipping silly little sweet juices in front of a café. He was flushed and nervous and tired looking, and rattled off a list of the fashionable people who were then in Paris as correctly as a _Galignani_ reporter could have done it.

"How's art?" I asked.

"Oh, very well," he replied. "I had a picture in the Salon last year, and another was commended at Munich, and I had another one at the Fair. That's pretty good for my first two years abroad, isn't it?"

The next year I saw him several times with various young women in the court-yard of the Grand Hôtel, than which there is probably no place in all Paris less Parisian. They seemed to be models in street dress, and were as easy to distinguish as a naval officer in citizen's clothes. He stopped me once again before I left Paris, and invited me to his studio to breakfast. I asked him what he had to show me there.

"I have three pictures," he said, "that I did the first six months I was here; they--"

"Yes, I know," I interrupted. "One was at last year's Salon, and one at the World's Fair, and the other took a prize at Munich. Is that all?"

He flushed a little, and laughed, and said, "Yes, that is all."

"Do you get much inspiration here?" I asked, pointing to the colored fountain and the piles of luggage and the ugly glass roof.

"I don't understand you," he said.

He put the card he had held out to me back in his case, and bowed grandly, and walked back to the girl he had left at one of the tables, and on my way out from the offices I saw him frowning into a glass before him. The girl was pulling him by the sleeve, but he apparently was not listening.

The American artist who has taken Paris properly has only kind words to speak of her. He is grateful for what she gave him, but he is not unmindful of his mother-country at home. He may complain when he returns of the mud in our streets, and the height of our seventeen-story buildings, and the ugliness of our elevated roads--and who does not? But if his own art is lasting and there is in his heart much constancy, his work will grow and continue in spite of these things, and will not droop from the lack of atmosphere about him. New York and every great city owns a number of these men who have studied in the French capital, and who speak of it as fondly as a man speaks of his college and of the years he spent there. They help to leaven the lump and to instruct others who have not had the chance that was given them to see and to learn of all these beautiful things. These are the men who made the Columbian Fair what it was, who taught their teacher and the whole world a lesson in what was possible in architecture and in statuary, in decoration and design. That was a much better and a much finer thing for them to have done than to have dragged on in Paris waiting for a ribbon or a medal. They are the best examples we have of the Americans who made use of Paris, instead of permitting Paris to make use of them. And because they did the one thing and avoided the other, they are now helping and enlightening their own people and a whole nation, and not selfishly waiting in a foreign capital for a place on a jury for themselves.

THE END

Transcriber's Note: 1. Obvious punctuation and typographical errors repaired. 2. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=.