Part 1

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IMMORTAL YOUTH

_A Study in the Will to Create_

_Behold my most beautiful work: the souls that I have sculptured. These they cannot destroy. Let the wood burn! The soul is mine._ --Romain Rolland: _Colas Breugnon_

IMPRINTED MCMXIX McGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS GRAPHIC ARTS BUILDING BOSTON

COPYRIGHT NINETEEN NINETEEN LUCIEN PRICE

_The first printing of this memoir is one thousand copies. When these are gone, those who wish more can obtain them from McGrath-Sherrill Press, the publisher, Graphic Arts Building, Boston, Massachusetts, for one dollar a copy._

[Music]

In _the third act of Wagner's last music-drama there comes a flourish of muted horns, remote, mysterious. In it sounds the grandeur of that quest which never ends--the quest of the Holy Grail. The phrase is repeated, and over the flower-starred meadow under the April sun of Good Friday morning comes a knight in dark armor, his visor down, carrying the holy spear. It is_ PARSIFAL. _His errand is the errand of aspiring youth in all lands and all ages. I set that phrase of music, compact with the poetry and pain of idealism, at the beginning of these pages in token of the spiritual brotherhood._

IMMORTAL YOUTH

Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. --HAMLET

I

There was a humble restaurant on Charles Street where cabmen and chauffeurs could be induced to tell the story of their lives over a combination-supper of lamb chop and two fried eggs costing (that was in 1912), with coffee and rolls, twenty-five cents. Across the table one evening in the spring of that year sat a young man about twenty-four years old. Anyone would have taken a second look at him; also a third, a fourth, and as many more as good manners would permit. What was there about him that attracted attention? It was hard to say. The dark eyes with a somber light burning in them? The rugged features and swarthy complexion with a ruddy glow of health in each jowl? The hands; very large and finely muscled? (I have never seen a more beautiful pair of hands on a human being.) It was all of these things and none of them. Rather it was the look of one with immense forces in reserve, bound on an errand.

Impossible to guess anything from his clothes: dark suit, shirt of gray flannel, and black knitted tie. Chauffeur? Hardly. Well then, what? Who?

(This is no isolated personal impression. Wherever he went people felt the same intense curiosity about him. Sometimes they stared at him so that he asked me if his face was smudged.)

Was this stranger conversible? He was. Presently he was speaking of the colonial doorways on Chestnut Street with a discrimination which suggested the architect. No. It appeared that he was studying under Mr. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Next, that he came from Pittsburgh. Here was a bond in common. As two young Middle Westerners we resented the social cold storage which New England imposes as a probationary period of acquaintance. We condoled. We fraternized. We were as neighbors meeting in a foreign land. At last somebody with whom it was safe to scrape acquaintance in the good old-fashioned Middle Western way without incurring suspicion of designs on one another's souls, bodies, or estates.

He climbed Beacon Hill with me to the house where I lived, carrying a paper bag which, he explained modestly, contained his breakfast: two bananas and a shredded wheat biscuit.

The evening was mild. Windows stood open to the breeze which rumpled the leaves of an old linden where it spread its boughs in the brick-walled court.

He promptly took off his coat, displaying in the rays of a green-shaded student lamp a pair of forearms worthy of the hands which went with them. Summer and winter he wore his sleeves rolled above his elbows. His wrists resented cuffs as wild creatures resent cages. He stretched out his long legs on a cot which did duty by the fireplace as a sofa; pushed his hair off his forehead with both hands, fingers interlocked, a trick he had; and gave symptoms of feeling at home.

Was he talkative? Not much! Never did clam yield shell to knife edge more gingerly. He would and he would not. Shy, reserved, proud, devoured with ambition, savagely determined, a prey to some misgivings, genuinely modest, and anxious to talk it over with the right person, but by no means sure who the right person was.

On sped the ambrosial hours of the spring evening. Bit by bit he revealed himself. This was his third year in the Museum School. He admired the technique of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Benson; he prized their instruction. But he distrusted their smoothness. He missed vigor. All round him he saw students neglecting their own creative bents to produce "little Bensons" and "little Tarbells." Already he had resolved to quit Boston as soon as his student days were over.

"I don't say I shall ever be able to paint as well as they can; but I must be myself,--not an imitation Tarbell."

There had been two years in Cornell before he came to Boston. He had rowed in his class eight on Lake Cayuga. Hence that physical self-respect which betokens the young man accustomed unconcernedly to strip in a college boathouse or gymnasium. But to eyes grown impatient with the college athlete's all too customary intellectual torpor and social complacency it was a holiday to find this well-made body, tall, broad in the shoulder, narrow at hips, lean and muscular, housing also the brain of the thinker and the spirit of the pioneer.

For the astonishing thing was to find a young man of this type studying to be a portrait painter instead of a bond salesman. It didn't sound Yankee. I said so. That shot rang the bell. He began to open up.

He was, it appeared, of German extraction. His grandfather, who had wished to become an artist, had come to America in a period when artists were about as much in request among us as concert pianists on a cattle ranch. He had earned his living as an architectural sculptor. The talent plunged, like a river, underground for a generation; then reappeared. What happened when this little fellow's fingers began to itch for the pencil was easy to guess. The father and grandfather put their heads together and resolved that he should have his chance.

It began to unravel. Now one understood the earnestness which seemed at first precocious--the seemingly cool indifference to the call of the world, the flesh and the devil which usually troubles youngsters of twenty-four. Here was something more than ambition. Loyalty, affection, gratitude, and family pride. This boy had more than talent. He had character.

* * * * *

With this we are in the heart of the conflict between the artist and the trader: between the will to create and the will to possess. It is the central conflict of any age; especially of this, and especially in America. The young man comes to the forks of the road where he must decide whether he shall acquire or create; whether he shall be a business man or a prophet. He finds himself in a society which offers princely rewards to the commercial career and little but pains and penalties to those who would create. This youngster was just learning his way around in the problem. He recited, with comical irony, the squalid platitudes which are chewed out at a youth bold enough to follow his creative bent:

"'Is there any _money_ in it?' 'Oh, of course, if you get to be a great painter. But how do you know you've got it in you to be a great painter? Think you have? Got a pretty good opinion of yourself, haven't you?' 'What if you fail? Suppose you wake up some morning and find yourself a middle-aged man and a fizzle? Guess you'll wish then that you'd stuck to plain everyday business and dropped all this highfalutin about art.' 'Yes. I suppose it's an easy life: sitting around and painting pictures. Pretty soft, eh? Give me a man's job!' 'Don't you think it's a little rash, my boy, to risk so much, when if you'd settle down to a good business you'd be sure of a decent living? And what about marriage? If you marry you'll have to paint pot boilers, and then what becomes of your art? You might as well be a business man and be done with it. And if you don't, is it worth going without a wife and children in order to paint pictures, and so come at last to a lonely old age?'"

He knew all the old ones by heart. Later we used to recite them together in concert like school children in the geography class.

If you took the roof off any Chamber of Commerce you would find half a dozen retired business men whose guilty secret it is that they dabble on the quiet with paint tubes, or modeling clay, or scenarios, or a violin--the poor, damned souls of artists. They have made their "pile." House and lot, wife and children, motor car and country club--all these they have; and yet, gnawing at their hearts is the secret knowledge that they have missed the big thing. They were born to beget children of the spirit; they were born to create in art, in music, in literature, in social experiment; and the ignoble standards of the society in which they live have bludgeoned and ridiculed them into prostituting their highest powers in the market-place.

In such relationship did this young man stand to the life of his country and his time. With unflinching eye he listened to its taunt:

"Artist, create at your peril! You may starve, for all me, until you win a reputation that is a commercial asset. After which, having despised you, I will do my best to corrupt you by rewards and flatteries gratifying to my intellectual snobbery."

Such were the terms. This youth, uncertain of his own powers, accepted them with quiet courage and imperturbable good humor. Such was the secret of that look of settled purpose so intriguing on a face so young, and such the secret of the fire which smouldered behind those dark eyes. He was prepared for a siege. He was ready to go to the mat.

It had taken three generations--son, sire, and grand-sire--to make this stand against the all-devouring maw of American commercialism: three generations to conquer and produce an artist. And mindful of his end I ask myself whether they did conquer. We shall see.

* * * * *

Midnight clanked from the city clocks.

"Gosh!" said he, "is it as late as that?" He stood up and knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the red bricks of the hearth. "By the way, I don't know your name."

I told him.

"Mine," said he, "is Fred Demmler."

Explaining that I already had a friend named Fred I asked if he had any objection to being called Fritz.

"None whatever."

"Fritz it is, then."

And Fritz it remained.

II

A once-aristocratic residential street now reduced to a teaming thoroughfare; pedestal to Beacon Hill; narrow, ill-paved, spattered with mud to the second story, double row of tall brick town houses, where Thackeray and Dickens were once guests, now placarding "rooms to let;" assorted antique shops and restaurants,--"the long, unlovely street" of _In Memoriam_, yet with a certain wistful charm in its decayed gentility: that is Charles Street.

Number 94 maintained its rubber plant on console-table in dark vestibule. There was a contraption, usually out of order, by which you pulled a bell five times to save yourself the climb if the art colony in the fifth-floor-back did not answer the ring. The young barbarians were usually out.

It was a colony of three: Ralph Heard, small, slender, fair, escaped from a western military academy of which he could tell tales that froze the blood; Irving Sisson, a tall, rangy Berkshire Yankee, dry and droll, an Artemus Ward turned art student (though known as "Siss" it would never have occurred to anyone to call him "Sissie," and if anyone _had_ been so rash, Sisson's grim reply would have been, like the man in the yarn, "Smile when you say that"), and Fritz.

Their room was a first act stage-set for an American version of _La Bohème_. It was large, low-ceiled, and had one of those sepulchral white marble mantel-pieces of the black walnut period. There was an iron bed and a cot, a gaslight always out of kilter, a writing-table strewn with pipes, unanswered letters, tiny bottles of india ink, drawing pens, crayons, thumb tacks, jars holding bouquets of paint brushes, and scurrilous caricatures of one another scrawled on scraps of white cardboard. The place reeked with that heavenly odor of paint tubes. By the window was a drawing board and portfolios. Canvases were stacked in a dark corner, faces to the wall.

Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by a triangle of tall brick houses,--the rears of houses on Charles and Brimmer Streets, the fronts of three quaint Italianate red-brick dwellings,--all enclosing a tiny greensward on which slender poplars rustled their glossy leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise the walls and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and on mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-like voices of the choir boys over the melodious thunder of great organ floated up to these windows. But I was never able to observe that it produced any pietistic tone in number 94. On the contrary they affected to take a lively interest in the upper windows of the houses opposite and threatened to keep a pair of field glasses on their window sill.

As you go down Pinckney Street to the river you pass a break in the solid row of house fronts through which you can look up and see the two windows of that fifth-floor-back. One always did look, and if they were lighted, it was impossible not to go up; for in that room there was always some form of what is technically known as "trouble." I never pass the spot now without looking up to see if there is a light in those windows.... They are dark.

* * * * *

On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz; student works. One was a small landscape sketch--smouldering red of a sunset after rain, burning through ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in violet mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain of thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its sincerity. There was none of that striving after effect, that ambitious rhetoric which youngsters usually mistake for eloquence: no attempt to make the scene anything more than what it was. The other was a portrait study of a workman naked to the waist. It was bold, vigorous, masculine, and overflowing with the joy of bodily health.

So far so good. But something else was in store.

Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a study of a woman's head in profile. One looked; and then looked again. "Who was she?" She had come to the school as a model for one week: that was all they knew. But her secret was on this canvas. She must have been in her early thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of a place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life has done its worst."

By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four guessed a secret like that? From that moment it was clear to me that he was a portrait painter.

"What," I asked, "is that little star in the lower corner of the canvas?"

"That? Oh," he explained diffidently, "that is put on pictures which the school saves for its exhibition."

III

That golden Spring! Clandestine dinners at an obscure French café in an obscure court, where one went because, though the food was something less than so-so, the sauces were exotic; "clandestine" because, behind closed shutters, they served _vin ordinaire_ without a license. Our parties, to the disgust of Jacques, were teetotal, the real attraction being that the joint might be pinched any minute.

On May afternoons in the Fenway, disguised in a baseball suit of gray flannel, Fritz rejoiced as a strong man to swat the pill. The pill swatted him one day, broke his thumb, and in the end he had to have it rebroken and reset under ether. His first words on coming to were: "Give me my paint box." All the nurses of his ward fell for him with a loud crash. In all innocence he told what a lot of extra trouble they went to for him. His friends smiled in their sleeves.

As often as there was a play of Shaw or Ibsen or Galsworthy or Maeterlinck or Shakespeare or Synge there were expeditions to peanut heaven. Knoblauch's _Kismet_ happened along and Fritz appropriated the cry: "Alms! for the love of Allah" for occasions choicely inappropriate.

When a fine May morning of blue and gold came winging over the city on the northwest wind he would get up extra early, hustle through his shave and cold tubbing and join me in the tramp over Beacon Hill, across the Common, and down into Newspaper Row for breakfast at the celebrated Spa. On the way up Chestnut Street, where the Brahmin pundits live, the favorite sport was to crack jokes at the expense of the sources of income which sustained these Georgian fronts and mahogany-and-brocade interiors: here, a famous brand of ale; there, notorious industrial nose-grinding in Fall River spinning mills--merry clank of dividend skeleton in genteel closet.... On the Common, jocund morning, fresh green of turf and tree, sweet breath of the earth; sunshine, bird-song, youth, ... Spring!

And on a stool at the Spa, Fritz's provoking grin and sly banter of a waitress who, after a good look at him, would conclude that if she was being kidded she liked it and was cheerfully ready for more. After which breakfast he trudged the mile and a half to the Art Museum to see the morning and to save his father carfares.

* * * * *

It appeared that he was a walker, and not afraid of rain. He proved it. On a May evening brewing thunder we did a dissolving view out of the city on a train for Cape Ann. At the end of the shore road around the Cape awaited lodgings at an inn and a midnight supper. At Gloucester he was introduced to one of Wonson's clam chowders and we set off at dusk.

That evening came the first inkling of his larger purpose--his higher than personal ambition: what he would paint after his portraits assured him a livelihood. Something was said about Pittsburgh and the mills.

"They ought to be painted," said he, "exactly as they are. Not sentimentalized like the magazine covers; not made romantic, as Joseph Pennell has made them; but painted in all their horror. Some day. I don't know enough yet."

Thunder had been muttering distantly. The night had turned pitch black. There were sullen flashes, and drops began to patter. Would he be for turning back? Not he! Then the storm came crashing and pelting across the granite moors of the Cape. Gorgeous flashes which flushed the winding tidal inlets and the rocky hills a brilliant rose pink. Flash! Crash! Swish went the rain. And the harder it stormed the better he liked it. He strode along intoxicated with color and sound.

Near Annisquam is a double shade-row of willows overarching the road. Not far beyond, yellow lamplight was streaming from the windows of a tiny cottage. Wading knee-deep in wet grass we knocked.

Now it is a complicated process explaining to two aged New England spinsters on a lonely road at nine o'clock of a stormy night what your errand is, especially when you haven't any. They listened; lifted the lamp on us for an inspection--particularly on Fritz; one soon got used to seeing people inspect him furtively--and invited us in.

"Walkin' round the Cape to Rockport, be ye? And in the rain? For the fun of it! Well, come in and set down. I'd like to get a good look at someone who'd walk to Rockport in the rain for the fun of it. Set down, young gentlemen."

We set. They were sisters. One was small and timid: she was of the sort that remain naïve to the end. The other was tall, angular and sardonic, with a mother wit smacking of the soil and the salt water. She addressed herself to Fritz:

"You ain't an escaped murderer, be ye?"

Fritz cackled lustily.

"How do you know I'm not?" said he.

"You look like that fella who's on trial in Boston now. I see his pictures in the paper ... and you come knockin' on the door at dead o' night in a thunder squall like in a story book."

"Would you say I looked like a murderer?" inquired Fritz with relish.

"You might look worse 'n him," replied our free-speech hostess. "By his pictures he's a good-lookin' fella. I says to Saide whiles we was weedin' garden this morning, 't wouldn't be safe to let him go now, for half the women in New England are ready to fall in love with him--he's been that advertised." She eyed us with her sardonic grin. I looked at Fritz. He was blushing.

To her shrewd Yankee wits we were clearly two lunatics, but harmless; and the object was to extract as much entertainment from us as the law allowed. Such was the tone of her farewell, half an hour later.

"If anyone asks who was here," said she, "I'll tell them it was two young fellas walkin' to Rockport in the rain for the fun of it.--And then they'll think _I'm_ one!"

* * * * *

Past midnight, stumping dog-tired into the inn; cold meat and bread, ravenously devoured; bed, and the sleep of the just.

... Morning; and such a morning as never was. Quite forgetting to dress, Fritz lost himself staring out of the open window at the quaint harbor, the fishing fleet, the blue bay and the gaunt headlands until it was suggested to him that passers by might be enjoying him as much as he was enjoying the morning.

There was an hour for soaking it in before the train left for the city, and soak it in he did. A sea of pale blue, like molten glass, untroubled by a breeze; sky the deep blue of a morning after storms; air sweet with the scent of blossoming orchards and dooryard lilacs and tart with the tang of salt brine; merry twitter of robins; lazy splash of surf; the long headlands tapering down to the sea; the squat white tower of Straitsmouth light solitary on its rocky islet, "and overhead the lovely skies of May."

In the midst of it stood a young artist, dumb with delight. His eyes drank.

Oh brethren of the possessing class, ye who must own this and that before you can enjoy, this world can never give the bliss for which ye sigh. That pilgrimage cost less than $3.00 per.

* * * * *

Evening. Above the tiny grass-plat and spindling poplars in Mount Vernon Square floats the magic of a night in mid-June. The windows of the fifth-floor-back in 94 Charles are lighted and open to the breeze. From those of the Advent come gusts of music,--rumbles of organ and the fresh voices of boys: choir rehearsal. But I think the sounds which float down from the windows of 94 are more in tune with the night: peal after peal of infectious laughter. It was clear to the meanest order of intellect that Sisson was telling stories which were more joyous than dutiful: also that he had Fritz going. There was no mistaking that laugh.

A belated delivery man, basket on arm, pauses beside me to listen and grin.

"I bet that was a good one," says he. "Say, but can't that guy laugh!"

IV

In the autumn he reappeared bronzed and husky from a summer on a Pennsylvania farm. That spring had been the overture. Now the curtain rose. How can my thin piano score reproduce that richly glowing orchestration?