Chapter 9

At the end of two years, Elliott wished to leave, because he despaired of painting like his master. "That is why I keep you," said Villegas; "you have retained your own manner and choice of subjects." So the pupil stayed on in Rome for five years, sharing his studio later with Aristide Sartorio, now a leading Italian painter. Here, in the Via Flaminia, he painted his first important mural decoration, for the dining room of Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago Lake Shore mansion. This work, called "The Vintage," is decorously inebriate, a vinous riot of little cupids. It led, shortly after his marriage in 1887 to Miss Maud Howe, a daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, to his establishing himself in Chicago, where he did many decorations and portraits. In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a beautiful brown--perhaps the most effective decoration in the world--and the ceiling tells at its true value.

This ceiling, fifty feet square, divided into two equal panels, represents the twenty Christian centuries, as horses, led by the hours (winged female figures) out of the mists of the past into the illumination of the present. The models for the horses were the undersized nags of the Roman Campagna, which are "small but decorative beasties," as Mr. Elliott puts it, and lend themselves to a slightly conventional treatment. They sweep two by two, out of a cool mistiness, round the ceiling past the suggestion of a pale moon, into the full radiance of the golden orb of the sun. The triumph of the picture is its handling of the problem of light. This golden daybreak pierces the mists whereon the horses gallop, touches here a flank, there a wing feather on one of the hours, and warms to rosy glow the tip of a cloud. It appears in unexpected places, grows where only shadow seemed to be, and surprises you anew each time you look up. Painted in the flat--that is, with no part of the picture telling as farther from the eye than another, to distort the proportions of the room--the ceiling yet has great depth, distance, airy lightness. It is a true decorative painting.

While at work upon it, Mr. Elliott painted many portraits, including the well-known red chalk heads of the "Soldiers Three," Lord Ava, the Marquis of Winchester, and General Wauchope; the portrait of His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge; and that of Lady Katherine Thynne, now Lady Cromer, a celebrated English beauty. Indeed, he made her the model for the second hour in the Boston ceiling, the figure next to the leader in the procession. Three studies of her head for this figure, well known from reproduction, are now in the possession of Thomas W. Lawson.

In Rome the Elliotts occupied for some time the apartments of Mrs. Elliott's cousin, the late F. Marion Crawford, in the Palazzo Santa Croce. In writing "With the Immortals," Mr. Crawford had collected many death masks, including one of Dante, which fascinated Mr. Elliott. Two pictures of "Dante in Exile" were the result. One of them now hangs in the living room of Queen Margherita of Italy, the other in the house of Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears of Boston. A third pastel study was made, an unfinished head of the poet, and thrown into a wastebasket. By a curious fatality, it is now better known than either of the paintings. Mrs. Elliott rescued the drawing, smoothed it out, framed it, and was allowed to hang it in her chamber. Later it was seen and purchased by Mrs. David Kimball of Boston, and in reproduction has gone all over the world, receiving honors in Japan and the higher honor of a place over the desk of many Dante students. Yet few who possess the reproduction know anything of the artist.

Mr. Elliott, receiving his commission to do a great mural painting for the new National Museum in Washington, again went to Rome four years ago. "Diana of the Tides" was completed and signed on Christmas day, 1908. Three days later came the awful news of the Messina earthquake, and the Hon. Lloyd Griscom, then American Ambassador to Italy, at once called for volunteers for his relief expedition. John Elliott was among the first to respond. He went south officially as an interpreter. Actually, he played the part of stevedore as well for ten days on the relief ship.

"I have dropped my last knuckle down the hold this morning," he wrote back, "and I have only two fingers left that I can wash."

After a few weeks, he hastened back to Rome, to give a promised public exhibition of "Diana of the Tides," and, as soon as the exhibition was over, rushed down to Messina again.

There Commander Belknap, who was at the head of the American relief forces, put him to work, as architect, on the erection of the American village, in the lemon groves on the outskirts of the stricken city. "I had never been trained as an architect," he says, "but I once made over a house up in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that gave me a practical experience which came in remarkably handy."

Most of the lumber had been cut for the erection of small houses, and the door and window frames were stock pieces. It became his task to design and build, as quickly as could be done, not only comfortable houses for many thousand people, but a church, a hotel, three schools, a hospital, all out of these small lumber units. He combined the units for the larger buildings, so grouping the small stock window frames as to give a pleasing effect of size, even constructing a kind of rose window for the church. He helped lay out the streets in such a way as to preserve all the trees possible. And, in spite of the haste with which the work had to he done, and the sixteen-hour-a-day strain under which the workers labored, the Zona Americana emerged an attractive and sanitary, as well as practical, village. Queen Helena, as soon as the American village was under way, got Mr. Elliott to go over the drafts for the plans of the American quarter in her village near by, working them up along the same lines. So, in four months, he designed and superintended the erection of houses, churches, schools, and hospitals for a town of several thousand inhabitants.

Commander Belknap's report spoke of him as "the first to volunteer, and the most devoted worker, sharing every hardship with unfailing good humor and leaving his beautifying touch on every part of the work."

On June 12, 1908, having built his town and recovered his lost knuckles, John Elliott returned to Rome, where the soil did not rock, and set quietly about making twenty-four small pastel drawings to illustrate a fairy story! From building houses for the wretched homeless sufferers, he turned to the play tales of childhood. He laid down the T square and the hammer for a piece of pastel crayon. But he had triumphantly refuted the scorn of the "practical man" for the artist. He had shown the stuff that dreams are really made of. Incidentally, he had won for himself a decoration from the King of Italy, and the medal of the American Red Cross Association.

"Diana of the Tides," which now covers the end wall of the right-hand gallery of the new National Museum at Washington, is akin to the Boston Library ceiling in its employment of horses symbolically, its light, luminous color, and its subtle play of illumination. This charm of illumination is unfortunately lost in reproduction. Mr. Elliott has made symbolic use of Diana, the Moon Goddess. in a way obvious enough, but hitherto, oddly, untried by artists. It is a way singularly appropriate in a museum of scientific character--a combination of ancient myth and modern science. As the Moon Goddess, Diana controls the four tides, which, in the shape of horses, draw her erect and jubilant figure on a great seashell. They are without guiding reins and harness, to suggest the unseen channels of her sway. If the reader will note an advancing wave, he will see that, just before the crest curls over, the foam is tossed back. Then the wave bows and breaks. So the nearest horse raises his head slightly, the next higher, the third tosses his head back, and the last has bowed his neck. In their motion and grouped attitudes. as they gallop up on the beach, is the rhythm of an oncoming wave. Farther than that Mr. Elliott wisely did not go. "Let them suggest more obviously a wave," he says, "and you have a trick picture. After a while, you wouldn't see anything in it but the trick." The wave motion is repeated on a comber out at sea, and, to the left, against a rock on the shore.

Diana stands behind the horses, against the great, golden moon--a radiant halo. She has just unloosed an arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the year when

The sun was setting opposite the moon.

Turner, in a small water color, has worked out a similar problem, with the cool copper of the harvest moonlight bathing one side of an old stone tower, the warm rose of sunset the other. In Mr. Elliott's great canvas the mutual lights kill all shadows, and out toward the great yellow disk of the moon the invisible sun floods its lilac and pink, kindling the waves, the draperies of the goddess, the wet flanks of the horses, and suffusing the whole painting with its delicate, bright warmth, which is yet kept too cool for gaudiness by the twilight of the moon.

While this canvas was being unpacked in Washington last winter, Mr. Elliott was exhibiting in Boston his portrait of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. It was begun and nearly finished at Newport four or five years ago; but Mr. Elliott has not cared to complete it, for during the interval the "Grand Old Lady" has considerably changed in appearance. She is now more than ninety years old. When the sittings began, Mrs. Howe had just recovered from an illness, and could read or talk only for brief periods. Mostly she sat looking out of her window at a bird which had a nest in a nearby tree. In this attitude, the eyes raised, the face quiet yet alert, the artist has caught her; calm, patient, but with one hand characteristically clenched on the arm of her chair, showing a touch of hidden force and commanding will. She is dressed in light green. The background is an indistinguishable brown. Her eyes have that very delicate light blue of advanced age, wistful yet prophetic. The skin, too, has the rare ivory delicacy of old age, of old age gently dealt with and protected. The light is unobtrusive yet luminous--morning sunshine. The picture is utterly simple; the more so for its touch of incompleteness. The masses are broad, artless. It is tender, reverential, a sweet and solemn glorification of old age, and of the old age of a distinguished spirit.

And at the exhibition in Boston one of the women visitors complained to the artist: "But you know, Mr. Elliott, when Mrs. Howe comes to the Woman's Club, she always looks so bright and animated, and always has something smart to say!"

To which the artist replied: "No doubt, my dear lady. But I was not painting a president of the New England Woman's Club, but the author of `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "

Queen Margherita of Italy made a truer comment when she saw the portrait in Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome. "That portrait deserves to go into any collection in the world," she said, "not because it is a good portrait of a distinguished old woman, but because it is a portrait of Old age as it ought to be."

Can it be that a mere Continental Queen is a better judge of art than a member of a Boston Woman's Club? Such thoughts are very disturbing!

Queen Margherita, ever since she first visited Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome ten years ago, has been his warm patron. It was for her he made his well known silver-point portrait of the late King Humbert, which she carries with her on all journeys. It has, indeed the boldness of line inseparable from good silver-point drawing, where a stroke once laid on is indelible and no "working over" is possible. When "Diana of the Tides " was exhibited in Rome in February, 1909, the Queen was one of the first visitors. She was not the first, the Chinese Minister arriving ahead of all others, on the stroke of ten--the opening hour--attended by all his suite, to signify his profound Celestial veneration for the Fine Arts. The Queen, seeing the picture, expressed delight and volunteered to tell her son, King Victor Emmanuel, about it.

A few days later, at seven thirty in the morning, there came a knocking at the door, with the announcement, "A message from the King."

The King, said the messenger, would follow in an hour. Presumably there was some hurry of preparation in the Elliott family. A New York artist, at any rate, at seven thirty A. M. would be in no condition to receive a crowned head--or any other! Promptly at eight thirty--punctuality being a royal virtue--King Victor Emmanuel drove up in a motor car with two aides. He remained half an hour. Being fond of horses, he found much in the picture genuinely to interest him. The artist accompanied the monarch to the door of his car, where he thanked him for the honor of his visit.

"Not at all," said the King, in his excellent English. "My mother told me to come."

Which shows, at least, that the Fifth Commandment is honored in Italy.

The twenty-four pastel drawings made to illustrate Mrs. Anderson's fairy tale, "The Great Sea Horse," were also exhibited in America last winter. Made immediately after Mr. Elliott's heartbreaking labor on the rocking soil of Sicily, they are none the less quiet, childish, and fanciful in their charm. Only one of them might have been inspired by the turning over in his uneasy sleep of the giant buried beneath Etna--the picture of the naked giant sitting on a headland and emptying his hot pipe ashes into the sea, where they form a volcano. The grim, grotesque old fellow is carefully drawn, with a fine rhythm of line in the seated limbs. His bulk dwarfs the headland, and his head and shoulders grow blue and pale in the sky. One questions why the ashes do not fall farther out to sea; they seem to lie in the shallow tide water on the beach. Barring this note of smallness, the picture is a true grotesque in miniature.

Mr. Elliott also works in genuine miniature. He has painted several portraits--of Mrs. Potter Palmer, the Chanler sisters of New York, and many more. He has painted landscapes, as well. Professor Barrett Wendell possesses a charming example. Most recently he has been engaged on a large mural decoration, best fitted, perhaps, for a music room, showing Pan seated on a tree trunk by a lake, making into a pipe the broken reeds in his hand after Syrinx eluded him. No horizon line shows. Pan and his tawny leopard skin (his automobile coat, the artist calls it) tell against the high purple banks across the lake. The god is making the best of his loss--making music of it, in fact. He was the eternal boy, before Mr. Barrie rediscovered him and surnamed him Peter.

And there is something of the eternal boy about John Elliott. He plays with a paint box on a fifty-foot ceiling or a twenty-seven- foot end wall, turns aside to paint a miniature on ivory, drops all his paints when a great national calamity comes and is converted into an architect overnight, building a whole town in four months and making it as beautiful as he can in the process, though the "practical" man would say that utility alone was demanded; and then, when this work is over, turning blithely back again to make pictures for a fairy book. He is strong, through his fresh imagination, to combine ancient myth with modern science in a huge decorative canvas, to reflect the dignity and loveliness and spiritual power of an exalted old age, to do practical work in a practical crisis--and to joy, at the same time, with the moon baby dancing on the beach!

"Jack Elliott," they will tell you who know him, "has an artistic temperament." Well, if this be the artistic temperament, what a pity there is not more of it in the world! It is not the temperament that is self-centered, whining, ineffectual. It is the temperament that does whatever comes to hand as well as it can, for sheer love of the task, and of beautiful workmanship that through imagination wins to sympathy, and through imagination grasps the opportunity to do practical work beautifully, where others would only do it practically. It is the temperament eternally boyish and buoyant, which is on the side of sweetness and light.

Perhaps it is not what the world means by the artistic temperament. But it is the temperament of the true artist. "Never do a pot-boiler," said Mr. Elliott to a young painter the other day. "Let one of your best things go to boil the pot." In these words is a rule of conduct that all of us--artists or artisans brokers or clerks, men or women--might well walk by toward the light of a more beautiful and cooperative society.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910

THE HEATHEN {page 193-204}

By JACK LONDON

Author of " The Call of the Wild," "Martin Eden," etc.

I met him first in a hurricane. And though we had been through the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the Kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten Kanaka sea men, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck passengers--Paumotuans and Tahitians, men, women, and children, each with a trade-box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets, and clothes-bundles.

The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl-buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon, the whitest Chinese I have ever known, one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half-dozen. It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete. Of course the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. he was only seventy tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade-room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth along the rails. In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, two deep, I'll swear. Oh, and there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the fore-boom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.

It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five hours, the trade died away in a dozen gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next day--one of those glaring, glossy calms when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache. The second day a man died, an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox, that is what it was, though how smallpox could come on board when there had been no known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa is beyond me. There it was, though, smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs. There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but die--that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whaleboat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.

That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became very nervous and voluble. The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whisky and proceeded to drink. The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon was attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.

We had a week of it, and then the whisky gave out. It was just as well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was the Heathen--at least that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the Heathen's existence.

But to come back. It was at the end of the week that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companion-way. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it, as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to chill the blood of any pearl-buyer in Oceania.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life-lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, IF--and there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane. We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?

Of course, the sea rose with the wind, frightfully, and I shall never forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels do when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The lifelines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for these when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade-boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.