CHAPTER XVI.
It was full two o'clock before I began to think of sleeping, but nevertheless I was on the rocks next morning at seven; and my punctuality was rewarded by the sight of Miss Lenox walking on the shore in a white dress. I clambered down and joined her before she seemed aware of my presence: then she turned and laughed softly in my face. "What an early riser you are!" she exclaimed. "You have brought excellent habits home from the lazy Old World."
"But it would be such a pity to miss 'the prettiest hour of the day'!" I retorted quickly.
"Were you surprised to meet me last night?" she asked.
"Perhaps so. I had at least not expected it. I was in Belfield on Wednesday, and supposed that you were there."
"You could easily have found out my whereabouts if you had called upon mamma. I should not have expected you to be in Belfield without going near our house."
"Mrs. Lenox has too often snubbed me in my boyhood for me to count upon her grace now," I returned. "But I hope your mother is very well."
But it was very droll to me that I had embarked upon something like an adventure for the sake of talking about old Mrs. Lenox. Still, Miss Georgy was well worth coming out to see with the flush of healthy sleep still upon cheek and lip and the morning light in her eyes.
"Mamma is well," said she soberly. "Poor papa too: though he is worked to death, he is still quite well."
"What does he do, then?" I asked. I knew that he was one of the book-keepers at the factories, but I wanted her to be the first to speak Jack's name.
"As soon as Mr. John Holt went into the business," she returned, very coolly, "he gave my father a position. He had promised to do it years before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."
"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"
"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it. How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was, through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."
Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent, that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still I no longer blamed her.
"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you, you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."
"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble," said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless engagement would have been a terrible burden."
"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me? does he complain of me?"
"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."
"Is he forgetting me?"
I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had lived down years ago.
"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom men forget."
"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets, and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one of them. All the softness has gone out of him."
I told her how wrong her idea of him was, and presently found myself repeating many things that he had said. Before I ended I had even let her hear of our midnight stroll about the place and our look at the gabled room where we believed her to be sleeping. This pleased her.
"That is not unlike you," she remarked with charming complacency, "but I never before heard of Jack's doing anything so poetic."
"Jack is not a man to write poems," said I, "but he is one of the men poets write about. After you had gone up stairs last night Helen sang to her father, and the words of one of her songs were Heine's: it reminded me of Holt beneath your window."
"One of those German songs? I understand nothing but English."
"They have translated it, and it runs like this:
Silent the streets by night overtaken:
This house my darling's presence did grace;
But she the town has long forsaken,
Yet there stands the house in the selfsame place;
And there stands a man who upward is staring,
His hands hard wringing in outbursts of woe!"
I paused and looked into her face.
"That is not all of it?"
"No: I will tell you the rest some day."
"Did Jack 'wring his hands in outbursts of woe'?"
"Good Heavens, no! I presume we both stood with our hands in our pockets: I was smoking a cigar myself. It is only in poetry that one may be picturesque in one's grief now-a-days."
"Did you think of me when you stood there, Floyd?"
Her little fingers closed on the edge of my coat and she looked up in my eyes. I smiled demurely. I was determined to be quite the master of myself with Georgina. I had suffered too much from her in the past not to be on my guard. Still, it was hard to resist the upturned face—the face with which was associated all the passionate inspiration of my early life—the face I had carried in my mind and heart through all my wanderings, finding none to compare with it—the face which always came with flash and quickness when I felt the warm desire and longing to love somebody which youth must always know.
I kissed her.
She looked at me startled, and ran ten paces away and sat down upon a rock.
"Upon my word!" she exclaimed, bursting into light laughter, "you have learned pretty manners abroad!"
"I am so glad you like them," said I, going up to her.
"But I don't like them at all," she retorted, shaking her head. "You remind me of a toy I used to play with years ago—a very pretty, harmless, inoffensive-looking toy, but which when touched unguardedly changed all of a sudden into a dreadful little fiend that flew right up into your face. Such a surprise is enough to make one's hair turn gray."
"At any rate, I have vindicated myself from the charge of being, 'pretty, harmless and inoffensive,' have I not? As for the gray hairs, I don't see one."
"I quite admired you last night," sighed Georgy, "you looked so interesting and innocent. Now—"
"Have I then suffered in your estimation?"
"I shall remember hereafter," she said with a delightful little laugh, "to whom I am talking. Now let us forget all about it. There are other things I want to talk about. I want to ask you how you like Helen."
"How I like Helen?" I did not fancy her question: I had never approved her tone regarding her cousin. "I think Miss Floyd very beautiful, and a very elegant girl besides."
"Do you like her proud cold manner?"
"Is she proud and cold? Perhaps so to Thorpe: certainly, she is the most unaffected child where the rest of us are concerned."
"She never forgets her wealth and position. I do not blame her: in her place I should be quite spoiled. Think of it!" she went on, with such eagerness that tears stood in her eyes: "Mr. Raymond left her everything—everything except a hundred thousand dollars which he gave to a college. She is so rich that she can lose a hundred thousand dollars and never feel it. It did not belong to the property, but came from a deposit which had accumulated ever since she was a baby. She begged her grandfather to do some good with it: she did not want to have everything herself. Might he not have given it to me?—Helen would have liked that—but no: he hated me too well for that. It has all gone for a dreary old professorship in the college where he graduated sixty years ago. And I am as poor as ever!"
"But Helen is generous with her wealth, I am sure: she will do a great deal for you."
"She gave me the money to buy the dress I am wearing, the very shoes on my feet;" and she granted me a delicious glimpse of French slippers. "But do you suppose I like alms? If I am a beggar, Floyd, it is from necessity, not because I have not plenty of pride. The child means to be good to me, I suppose, but it makes me bitterly angry with her at times that she has the right to be gracious and condescending. I am such an unlucky girl!"
But she laughed while she complained, and I echoed her laugh when she said she was unlucky.
"You unlucky!" I exclaimed. "You are one of those women who have it in their power to have every wish in life granted."
"I am not so sure of that. Besides, it is hard for me to know what I want now-a-days. I used to think if a fairy came offering me the fulfilment of my dearest longing, it would be easy enough to secure lifelong happiness at once: I should have asked for wealth. But now they are comfortable at home: they would not know how to spend more money than papa earns at the factory. And I am comparatively rich: I have almost five hundred dollars in my purse, part of the thousand which Helen gave me a month ago. I cried myself to sleep last night, I was so unhappy; yet, all the same, I am not quite sure what I want. Life is so dull! That is what ails me, I think."
I looked at her in uncertainty as to her mood, but she left me in doubt, and began telling me about society at the Point, her friend Mrs. Woodruff, and the houseful of guests. She told me stories with some scandalous flavor about them, enough to give them a zest; she mimicked all the earnest people and spoke with contempt of all the shallow ones; she appeared to have fathomed all the petty under-currents which influenced people's actions, detected every shade of pretension and studied all the affectations and habits of the men and women she saw intimately. All this, too, without betraying any personal liking for one of them, and seeming to regard them all as mere puppets, to some of whom she attached herself when there was anything to gain, and from whom she withdrew herself when there was anything to lose. But she was too clever to allow me time to think what qualities of mind and heart lay behind this philosophy, and I was very much diverted.
"I must take you to see Mrs. Woodruff," she remarked. "You will be welcome in the set as flowers in May. You are spending the summer here, I suppose?"
"I have no plans. Where my mother is I shall be for the present, I have been separated from her so long."
"How beautiful! But about your future, Floyd? Have you a career decided upon, or are you to be a gentleman of leisure?"
I flushed: "My resolution is not taken as to what I shall be—certainly not an idle man."
"I can tell your fortune," she said in a low voice. "You need not cross my palm with silver for it, either."
"With gold, then?"
"I will tell it for love, but it is a golden fortune. You will marry Helen Floyd."
"No," said I with decision and some anger, "I shall never marry Helen. You do me too much honor. She would never look at me; and if she would there is something within me which forbids my marrying a rich woman. But it is nonsense. For Heaven's sake don't allude to it again! The man who marries her will be, to my thinking, the most fortunate of men, but—"
"We won't talk about it," said she good-naturedly. "There comes Mr. Thorpe to bid us good-morning. Astonishing how well he likes the walk to The Headlands!"
It was Thorpe indeed, carelessly but irreproachably dressed as usual, and looking at us with a smile of internal amusement, which he was probably too well-bred to express in words, for he merely drawled a good-morning and remarked on the beauty of the day.
"You're a famous pedestrian in these days, Thorpe," I said, rising with a trifle of embarrassment from my seat as close to Miss Lenox's as the rocks permitted, "and an early riser too. When I got up this morning at half-past six I told myself that I should see nobody for three hours at least, yet both Miss Lenox and you equal me in my love for the early morning hours."
But Thorpe was indifferent, and I saw at once that his mind was too preoccupied to allow of his wasting a thought upon the reason of my rising earlier than usual. "If you got up at half-past six," said he coolly, looking at his watch, "you must be ready for your breakfast, for it is a quarter to nine."
"I shall go in," remarked Georgy, rising and shaking out her white skirts and putting herself to rights generally after the manner in which birds and women plume themselves. "Did you come to breakfast, Mr. Thorpe?" she inquired with bare civility.
"I thought of dropping in," he returned; and as I assisted Miss Lenox up the ledge I turned to see if he were following us. He seemed to be waiting, however, for us to get away, and when I gained another distant glimpse of him he was apparently searching for something in a crevice of the rocks. Yet we were scarcely on the back piazza, before he had rejoined us in high spirits, and I was conscious of a gleam in his eyes which I had never seen before.
I could not resist speculations upon the reasons of his intimacy at the house, but dismissed them all as idle, for I knew very well that the habits of a young man at a watering-place are made by the necessity of filling up the hours of the day with occupation. The cottagers have perfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast. Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously, and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries, Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve her with chilly disdain.
"Now that Floyd is here," said Mr. Floyd when we were through breakfast, "I shall indulge in laziness no longer, but shall sit by and see him work." And the result was that for the next two weeks he and my mother, Helen and I, all sat in Mr. Raymond's study for an hour or two every morning and looked over his papers. Two or three times Mr. Wickham the lawyer came from New York, and it was easy enough to see that Helen's property was so large, its investments so various, that its proper care was work enough for one man.
"I shall look about for a husband for her at once," Mr. Floyd said half a dozen times to the lawyer when we three men were alone: "nobody can expect me to waste my few energies in looking after all these interests."
"Depend upon it, sir," Mr. Wickham would return with an easy chuckle, "you will find the world full of young men who will be happy to relieve you of every responsibility regarding Miss Floyd's fortune."
"They shall none of them have her," her father exclaimed once, fiercely—"not one! No man but one who loves her for her sweet self alone shall ever have my little girl." At such times Mr. Wickham always looked at me with a critical curiosity which I could forgive in so old a friend of Helen's, but which at the same time robbed me of a certain composure I should have liked to carry through the difficulties of my present position. For I was, in truth, performing all the duties of an executor and mastering the details of the schedule of property, while Mr. Floyd sat by and made jokes upon the way Helen would spend her income.
"Hair-pins cost a great deal," he would affirm solemnly, "and pins. How much pin-money had the princess royal? Put down fifteen thousand dollars for hair-pins, black pins, white pins: what other pins do women use?"
"But," I would expostulate, "you must attend to this."
"And why?" he would ask, turning his fine melancholy eyes upon me. "Don't tire me out, Floyd."
We were alone, although my mother and Helen were almost within hearing on the balcony.
"I am willing to do everything for you, sir," I said, "but nevertheless it seems to me that it is scarcely prudent for you to entrust me with your duties. I am totally inexperienced; my knowledge of finance is the mere mastery of figures; I am—"
"Look here, dear boy," said Mr. Floyd in a kind but weary voice: "I am only trying to save you trouble. When I die you will take my place as Helen's executor and trustee. It would be harder then for you to learn the mystery of all these details by yourself. Now I am here to teach you."
Ellen W. Olney.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
TO THE RAINBOW.
O Iris! bringing balm for Summer's tears,
So lightly gliding down thy bridge of rose,
I know not why my spirit drinks repose
Soon as thy footfall the horizon nears.
Spellbound I watch the crimson-shaded piers
As arch by arch the blooming pathway grows,
And where the richest flush of color glows
I trace thy trailing garments. Sighs and fears
Have vanished: in one long and ardent gaze
Thy steps I follow down the heavenly slope.
Iris, be mine thy message! Let thy rays
Write out how I with destiny may cope.
Ah! spanned with light would be all coming days,
Could I but read thy oracle of hope.
Frances L. Mace.
THE PARIS EXPOSITION OF 1878.
III.—FINE ARTS.
IT is the "Memorial Hall" of the Champ de Mars—the Gallery of Fine Arts which there takes the place of the familiar building in Fairmount Park—that has decided the really great success of the Exposition of 1878. The unanimous verdict of popular admiration was given at Philadelphia to the machinery: in Paris it is as strongly pronounced in favor of the fine arts. Paris is, indisputably, the capital of modern art, and her title to this proud distinction is to-day confirmed by the assembled peoples with all the solemnity and authority of a universal congress.
I have, like all visitors no doubt, yielded to the seductive spell of this magnificent collection of objects of art, to which two worlds have contributed, and under the influence of the keen and exalted enjoyment of the first few days I should have found it impossible to qualify by a single censure the expression of my admiration. But after a short retirement in the country, where I allowed my mind to lie fallow, I found that I could revisit the galleries of the Champ de Mars with more judgment and method, and that the beauties of the first order, which I admired as much as ever, no longer made me blind to the defects and the weak points of certain parts.
First of all, it must be admitted that the Exhibition of this year is not equal to that of 1855; and this is no more than was to be expected, when one remembers that the latter had brought together the scattered masterpieces of the long period of half a century—a period illustrated by such names as Ingres, Delacroix, Decamps and others. This splendid assemblage of so many important works could not be repeated in 1867; and at that time there were unmistakable indications that a new artistic current had set in, and we saw the first rays of the coming glory of the painter of genre and of landscape—the triumph of Meissonier, of Gérôme, of Théodore Rousseau, of Corot.
This year, the tiny, pleasing genre pictures are still very numerous, and in this respect the Exposition of 1878 is not unlike that of 1867, while in another aspect it is superior to it. If, on the one hand, we miss the names of the great masters of landscape, who, dying, have left no successors, we have, on the other hand, to hail the advent of some others who have risen above the level of genre and have returned to the traditions of high art: I refer to MM. Bonnat, J.P. Laurens and Baudry. Thanks to these great artists, one can assert with confidence that there has been an advance within the last ten years. And how art widens its borders and augments the number of its adepts! How many painters there are to-day!—of the second or of the third rank, to be sure, but masters of their business, skilful and conscientious. In 1867 the jury admitted but four hundred pictures. In 1878 it has had to receive eleven hundred! Evidently, French art is in the fulness of its summer bloom. Its decline will come, for Art, which knows no country, and has wandered from the East to the South, and from the South to the West, will doubtless travel still, and will some day leave Paris to dwell with other races and under other skies. But to-day her home is Paris—Paris, her well-beloved city.
Since 1871 especially, we have witnessed a fresh starting into life, an activity, indeed, almost feverish. In 1871 and in 1874 the Minister of Fine Arts officially recognized a general return toward serious and vigorous work, and in 1876 he bore testimony to the exceptional brilliancy of the Salon, which showed the "influence and impulse of a genuine revival."
Historical painting, unfortunately, can never be adequately represented at exhibitions. Designed for the civil and religious monuments of France, whence, from the nature of the case, they cannot be removed, its most important illustrations are to be found at the Opéra, at the Palace of Justice and of the Legion of Honor, at the museums of Marseilles and of Amiens, the Hôtel de Ville of Poitiers, and in the numerous churches of Paris and throughout the country. The immense work which Baudry has executed for the foyer of the Opéra is absent from the Exhibition, and this great painter, whom some consider the first of his time, is not represented at the Champ de Mars by even a sketch. Fortunately, the Palace of Justice has parted with two principal works of Léon Bonnat, his Christ and Justice between Guilt and Innocence. The Panthéon has permitted the exhibition of the large decorative paintings in which Cabanel has represented the principal episodes of the history of St. Louis. But the largest historical canvases on the walls of the gallery are those by J.P. Laurens, belonging to the museums of Florence, of Havre, of Nantes and of Toulouse. Laurens delights in the Middle Ages, gloomy and stately periods of ecclesiastical domination and feudal violence. He is the painter of tortures and of tombs (the Exhumation of Pope Formosus, The Interdict, Francis Borgia before the Coffin of Isabella of Portugal), but his vigorous and severe genius never suffers him to fall into overstrained action and theatrical artifice. He does not move us by declamatory gestures and forced attitudes. Nothing can be more simple, yet nothing more affecting, than the Execution of the Duc d'Enghien and the Death of Marceau. Many young artists are following this new path, which has opened such success to M. Laurens. MM. Cormon, Dupain (in his Good Samaritan), Benjamin Constant (Entry of Mohammed II. into Constantinople), and Sylvestre (Locusta and Nero trying a Poison) have sent to the Champ de Mars the fine historical compositions that gained for them the first medals and the prize of honor at the last Salons. M. Tony Robert-Fleury has two vast canvases, the Sack of Corinth and the Reform of the Mad-house in 1795—large and admirable compositions, which engraving has already made popular. Of course we find M. Landelle's inevitable Eastern Dancing-Girl, and an Italian Woman by M. Hébert. There could be no exhibition without these. These two painters have talent, individuality, delicacy of feeling, but they are absolutely without imagination. M. Hébert, in particular, has learned nothing since his Malaria, which has been for a long time at the Museum of the Luxembourg. He has not discovered, nor even sought for, anything beyond this; and this eternal repetition of the same subject is a malady which afflicts too many of the artists of our day. One no longer distinguishes between the pictures of certain of our popular painters. Even M. Luminais never travels beyond his specialty, which is the barbarian Gaul, though he does vary somewhat the attitudes and physiognomy of his characters. Henner and Ribot, two great artists, who are better appreciated by their professional brethren than by the public, will undoubtedly gain much by this year's exhibition. The eulogy of competent criticism will be accepted as authoritative, and will compel the admiration of the crowd, which is not very apt to comprehend new and original forms in painting. Schopenhauer has classified the professions according to the degree of difficulty which they find in making their merits understood by the world at large; and he puts in the front rank, as the most quickly and easily comprehended and applauded, acrobats, dancers and players; philosophers come last of all; and immediately before them the painters.
Portraiture would seem to be more in esteem than ever. Everywhere along the walls are to be seen nothing but statesmen, poets and women of the world, whose identity is indicated in the official catalogue by initials only, but whom everybody recognizes at a glance. Many of these portraits are life-like and admirable in expression, and one can say of them what Victor Cherbuliez said of Mademoiselle Nelly Jacquemart's picture of Thiers: "The house is inhabited: some one is looking out of the window." This time Mademoiselle Jacquemart exhibits portraits of M. Duruy, M. Dufaure and a young lady. Singularly enough, she paints men better than she does women. Her portrait of Mademoiselle G—— B—— is very inferior to the others. Virility, in short, is the distinguishing characteristic of the talent of this woman.
M. Cabanel's portraits of women of the great world are conventionally painted, and with the coldness of manner which distinguishes him. One feels that if these fine creatures should speak they would utter nothing but the commonplaces which pass for conversation in the salons. The duchess of Vallambrosa—"the queen of the strand," as they call her at Cannes—Madame de Lavalette, the countess of Mercy-Argenteau, are all there, as if against their will and disdainful of the vulgar herd which is staring at them. To make amends, however, the duchess of Luynes is charming, surrounded and, as it were, adorned by her beautiful children. M. Cabanel is the recognized head of what may be called the official school. To get medals and crosses or the prize of Rome, to obtain commissions from government, it is now-a-days almost necessary to have been his pupil. Never had painter a more lofty position. Perhaps it is the opinion at the ministry of Fine Arts that Bonnat and Laurens will be so well paid by posthumous fame and the admiration of future generations that it is but fair to keep the balance between the masters even by rewarding M. Cabanel in his lifetime.
I have said that there are many portraits at the Exhibition, but I do not mean to complain of this. Indeed, we cannot too highly applaud the revival of this noble branch of art, to which we owe the Joconde of the Louvre and the Violin-player of the Sciarra Palace. Many a fair young girl unknown to fame, many a matron whose quiet life will pass unheeded by the world, will by her portrait enter into immortality. Torn, sooner or later, from the family roof and carried to a museum, there to be gazed upon by thousands of eyes, her smile or her reverie will recall for generations to come that sigh of Sénancour's: "O woman that I might have loved!"
It is doubtful if this regretful tribute to genius—which may perhaps some day be heard before the portraits of Henner, of Bonnat or of Madrazzo—will ever be inspired by those of M. Carolus Duran. This artist is the painter of elegant trifles and worldly vanities, of grand and striking toilettes, of blondes in violet and yellow and brunettes in gray and rose, for, like M. Worth the man-milliner, it pleases his fancy to attempt the reconciliation of the most inimical colors. For the rest, the future will no doubt owe him a debt of gratitude for the precious evidence which his pictures will furnish of the dress of the period. Indeed, without the help of certain of our portrait-painters future investigators would find themselves sadly at a loss in reconstructing the Paris of Napoleon III. and of the Third Republic. We are so much under the influence of the past that our artists scarcely have the sentiment of the civilization which surrounds them. Our colleges send us into the world, not Frenchmen, but Greeks and Romans, knowing nothing of modern life, and inspired by our classical studies with a profound contempt for the manners and usages of the present day. Our statues, bas-reliefs, medals and pictures represent the events of all ages except our own. The attempts in the direction of realism of these latest days, the paintings of Courbet and Manet, seem, by a sort of instinctive preference, to seek out the ugly, rather than to give us an exact reproduction of contemporaneous Nature. Some of our genre painters—Millet, for example, and Jules Breton—have, it is true, studied the actual and the modern, but their types are all taken from the rustic class, and it is safe to say that outside of portraiture neither the men nor the women of the world will leave a trace upon the art of the period.
Let us note, however, one exception to this statement. I refer to certain painters of military scenes who have chosen to call up the spectre of the Franco-German war—Édouard Detaille, Neuville, Boulanger. These have ventured to depict one side of modern life—and an important one, alas!—modern warfare, not by showing us those episodes of classical combat where half a dozen cavaliers, mounted upon their heavy historical horses, fight hand to hand for the possession of a flag, and trample under foot a wounded wretch whose very pose is traditional, but by giving us actual scenes witnessed during the autumn of 1870 and the winter of 1871—scenes often frightful, but always grandly effective and worthy of art. A sentiment of diplomatic propriety, with which the Germans were but little troubled at Philadelphia, has naturally kept these paintings out of the Champ de Mars, and banished them to Goupil's in the Rue Chaptal. We certainly do not complain of this, but we cannot help regretting that modern life should be so slightly represented in the art of an epoch indued with a life so intense. There are laurels yet to be won in the field of serious painting—triumphs such as Balzac, Thackeray and Tourgueneff have achieved in literature, and Gavarni in caricature, by the faithful representation of phases of modern life.
Since so many Frenchmen are converted by their early classical training not only into citizens of Rome or of Athens, but into veritable pagans, we naturally find the Exhibition full of gods and goddesses, of demigods and nymphs—the Truth of M. Jules Lefebvre, for instance, and his Vision, losing itself in the mists of morning; the Sarpedon of M. Lévy; M. Bouguereau's Flora and Zephyr and Meeting of Nymphs; the Naiads of Henner, etc. Amongst all these mythological tableaux one's attention is arrested by the striking productions of M. Gustave Moreau, a remarkable union of technical ability and poetical fancy—hallucinations of an opium-smoker who should be able to paint his visions with all the confidence and knowledge of a master. Paul de Saint-Victor, the eminent critic, has called these canvases "painted dreams;" and they cannot be better described. Hercules fighting the Hydra of Lerna, Salome, Jacob and the Angel, Moses exposed upon the Nile, are dazzling phantoms, which, eluding the literal text of history, recede to the depths of an unknown past. We do not think of discussing their accuracy: we are absorbed in admiration of this wondrous art, at once subtle and splendid, which makes us dream of lost civilizations and buried empires. Gustave Moreau is more than a painter: he is a magician and his pencil is an enchanter's wand.
For the rest, we have plenty of archæological painters, who painfully restore antiquity for us, following accurate authorities and examples. The curiosity to know the past, which has created a literature of its own, the researches of travellers and of learned men, the excavations made in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Africa, at Pompeii, have led many artists to search for new effects in this direction. Every one will recall the circuses and the Roman scenes of Gérôme. This year he exhibits hardly anything but modern Oriental subjects—Turkish baths, Bashi-Bazouks and lions—but his pupils have now taken the place which their master held in 1867. Hector Leroux, one of the thousand and one painters of this Neo-Grecian school, shows us a Toilette of Minerva Polias and A Miracle in the Temple of Vesta, his most celebrated work. Gustave Boulanger exhibits his Roman Baths, his Roman Comedians rehearsing their Rôles, and his Roman Promenades, which the wealthiest amateurs, MM. Aguado, André, Stebbins, contended for at the late Salons; M. Lecomte du Nouy his Pharoah slaying the Bearers of Evil Tidings and his Homer Begging; while M. Alma-Tadema completes the group with his best-known pictures, including The Studio of an Antique Painter, An Audience at the House of Agrippa, and The Vintage at Rome, which was also at Philadelphia. Americans will remember the young reddish-haired priestess of Ceres, so elegantly attired and coiffée, advancing with torch in hand and followed by flute-players. The details, which are multiplied almost to profusion, are all calculated to enhance the effect, and are distributed with exquisite art. The amount of research which this work suggests is almost incredible, and it was perhaps a more laborious undertaking to paint the Vintage at Rome than to write the Carthaginian romance of Gustave Flaubert. Alma-Tadema exhibits in the English gallery, and his contribution has raised the average of that section by a good third. If I have spoken of this painter in connection with the pupils of Gérôme, it is that, considering his place of birth (Dromvyp, Netherlands), I think that I have an equal right with the English to classify him according to my fancy.
But let us leave the remote antiquity in which the poet-painters of the Neo-Greek school delight to dwell, and come back to modern times. Passing through one of the central rooms, one is struck by the appearance of a great space of gilded wall hung with pictures considerable in number, but mostly quite diminutive in size. It needs no reference to the catalogue nor to the signature of these works to tell us the name of their author. If the singular talent which they display were not enough, the mise en scène would leave no doubt that this extraordinary piece of wall has the honor of supporting the exhibit of M. Meissonier. M. Meissonier holds a great position in contemporary art—a fact which is known to everybody, and to no one better than to M. Meissonier. But it was in 1867 rather than in 1878 that he ought to have gilded his wall. It was in the former year that he exhibited his 1814, his Reading at Diderot's and other incomparable works, which placed him beyond all dispute at the head of the French school. To-day he shows us but one considerable work, the Cuirassiers of 1805, and fifteen small pieces—very pretty things, but then he has taught his pupils to imitate him too well! They have so often and so skilfully counterfeited the art of their master that the dignity of his work seems lessened and its value diluted, as it were, until for the substance we are given the shadow, and the tableau is replaced by the tableautin. The same tendency to contraction is apparent in every country. Paintings are growing smaller, as if to keep in proportion with the small modern salons. That this is due to the great influence of M. Meissonier there is no doubt, but no diminution of his own fame accompanies the dwindling of his pictures.
And yet there are half a dozen painters at the Champ de Mars who lack nothing but the golden wall to make them the equals of the master. M. Detaille is absent, but we have M. Worms, with seven little chefs d'œuvre; M. Vibert, with his Departure of the Spanish Bride and Bridegroom, the Serenade, and the Toilette of the Madonna; M. Firmin Girard, with his Flower-Girl; M. Berne-Bellecour, in his famous Coup de Canon; MM. Fichel, Lesrel, Louis Leloir and others whom I have not space to mention, as exact and as minute in detail as their chef, and, moreover, almost as well paid by amateurs, especially Americans.
Landscape-painting mourns the loss of its greatest masters. Amongst all the painters, Death seems to have singled out the paysagistes by preference. Since the last Exhibition how many have gone! Chintreuil, Belly, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Millet, Diaz, are no more. A few canvases recall them—the Wave of Courbet, an admirable effect of snow by Daubigny, and four or five pictures by Corot—but one regrets that the illustrious dead have not had the honor of a room apart. The members of the jury have been careful to keep the best places for their own works, while the masterpieces of departed genius have been banished to the top of the walls or half hidden in corners. M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau fill whole rooms with their pale compositions, and—Millet is absent!
Has the school of French landscape-painting survived these serious losses? We may reply with confidence that it has. This very year, in the Exposition of the Champs Élysées, the Haymaking of M. Bastien Lepage reveals a great painter. At the Champ de Mars there are admirable landscapes by living artists—Hanoteau, who with such masterly power of execution bends and crooks in every direction the knotted branches of his giant oaks; Émile Breton, painter of the melancholy scenes of winter; Harpignies, faithful interpreter of the varying aspects of the valley of the Allier under all the changes of day and season; Eugène Feyen and Feyen-Perrin, who delight us with the sea-coast of Brittany and its fisher-women and bathing-women; Van-Marcke, who is less than the successor, but more than the imitator, of Troyon; and finally, MM. Pelouse and Ségé, representatives of new forces and processes.
Americans are supposed in Paris to prefer highly-finished and elaborate work, like that of Gérôme, but I have seen in America examples of the painter who elaborates least of all, who lays on his colors in the boldest manner—in a word, the painter of general effect, Isabey. It is refreshing to meet again, here, his Wedding-Feast, a delightful repose to the eye, almost wearied with minute perfection of detail.
Before quitting the labyrinth of French art we must not forget a class of painters who have received a great deal of admiration, and who deserve it, whatever rank one may be disposed to assign to their special branch of art. I refer to the painters of still-life. There is Vollon, for instance, whose name suggests those wonderful representations of armor, of rich goldsmith's work, superb tapestries and damascened metal, to say nothing of the equally admirable counterfeits of warming-pans and saucepans, which delight the lover of nature-morte. We find here his famous kettle of red copper, sold at a price which might suggest that it was of solid gold. Amateurs and dealers pronounce Vollon the first of painters in his specialty, though there are some who profess a preference for his rival, Blaise-Desgoffes, of whom there are three examples in the Exposition; and though these are only Venetian glass, Gothic missals, jewel-boxes and the like, there are some of them worth thirty thousand francs at the very least: it will be understood that I speak of the paintings, and not of what they represent. Philippe Rousseau displays not less than a dozen pictures, and the names of their owners, Alexandre Dumas, the baroness de Rothschild, Barbedienne, Édouard Dubufe, etc., show how much he is the mode. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine cheeses more savory, fresher oysters, peaches and vegetables more inviting, and flowers—I had almost said more fragrant, so perfect is the illusion of reality.
But we must tear ourselves from these fascinating galleries, for should we write for ever we shall always be sure to forget some celebrity who deserves to be mentioned. We have said nothing of the scenes from fashionable life; nor of the dogs and horses which MM. Claude and J. Lewis Brown render so capitally; nor of the portraits of Pérignon, Édouard Dubufe and Cot; nor of the flowers of Mademoiselle Escallier. Three great names, Jules Dupré, Rosa Bonheur and Puvis de Chavannes, are absent—one knows not why.
Belgium is next in order—thrifty Belgium, where painting is a commercial industry and its products an important article of exportation. The Belgian display in the Champ de Mars is certainly a considerable one in point of numbers, which will not surprise us when we remember that there are at least twelve art-schools in the country—to say nothing of the great academies of Brussels and Antwerp—where hundreds of young men are daily drilled in the grammar and technique of art. But genius is the gift of Nature, not of schools. All that the latter can bestow is probably here, but we miss the imagination, the variety, the sentiment of the born artist, and it needs no very critical examination of these paintings to show us that the acquired dexterity of the academy, the mere business of the painter, is almost the only characteristic of the Belgian school.
There are some examples of "high art," such as The Pope and the Emperor of Germany at Canossa in 1077, by M. Cluysenaar, a composition as cold as it is vast; some illustrations of the national history by M. Wauters, who reminds us, in some respects, of the great French painter Laurens, though lacking his power; and there are the historico-religious pictures of M. Verlat. But much the best things in the Belgian collection are the numerous works of a painter whose aims are not so high, and who in Brussels seems like an exile from Paris. M. Alfred Stevens draws his inspiration from fashionable life; and no Parisian could surpass the execution of his velvets and laces and the thousand new stuffs which Fashion invents every year—gants de Suède, and faces too of a certain type, the pretty chiffonnées faces of girls of every rank in life. But the pretty faces are, after all, mere accessories in a picture where the principals are the hat and the dress and the parasol, upon which, as any one can see, the artist has bestowed all his loving care. Nothing of his, however, in the Exposition can compare with his Young Mother, which I saw last year in the Academy at Philadelphia.
Next after Stevens, in point of reputation, comes M. Willems, who really belongs to the French school of Gérôme, but who feels himself under obligation, in his character of Fleming, to paint nothing but what Terburg and Metzu painted two centuries before him. The man without a plumed hat and big boots and a great sword at his side has, for M. Willems, no existence. I would not say that he does not paint hat, boots and sword as well as the old Flemish masters themselves did, but while they drew from the life he paints at second hand, and the modern artist who passes his days in the vain effort to revivify the models of his predecessors will always rank below the masters whom he imitates, as M. Willems does, with so many others whom a false public taste encourages in a hopeless pursuit.
There are no landscapes in the Belgian section, if one may be allowed to except the marines of M. Clays, and yet Belgium can boast of at least one excellent paysagiste, M. César de Cock, who, unfortunately, is not represented in the Exposition.
French painters have often been blamed for neglecting the material around them, and for trespassing upon the domain of foreign artists by representing Russian peasants and Italian beggars or selecting subjects from Spain or Japan; but I have looked in vain through the various galleries for any evidence that other countries are a whit less obnoxious to this reproach than our own. Each nation forages in its neighbor's field. Is it too much to hope that modern art may free itself from the bondage of a senseless fashion, and may take to the study of the living types close at hand? Russia and America, for instance, have shown themselves capable of producing a literature distinctively national and characteristic: must they ever remain without a school of art as indigenous to the soil, and shall their painting never have its Tourgueneff and its Bret Harte? The law of development may require that the birth of a nation's art shall succeed that of its letters—though the history of the Renaissance would seem to contradict this theory—but whether this be so or not, it is certain that one does not imagine one's self in Moscow while perambulating the Russian salon in the Champ de Mars, where the best representative of the national art, M. Siemiradski, has chosen for the two paintings which have deservedly won a medal of honor subjects from ancient Rome—the one an amateur hesitating in his choice between two articles of equal value—namely, a chased cup and a female slave—and the other representing a soirée of Nero. The subject of this last is horrible. The tyrant, crowned with flowers and surrounded by women and freedmen, descends from his palace. Attached to long poles and besmeared with pitch, ready for the fatal flame, are the living bodies of wretched Christians which will illumine to-night the gardens of Cæsar. Living Torches is the title of the picture, which is one of the most successful paintings of the Exposition, and has given its author a high rank among contemporary artists.
The painters of the United States naturally feel the inspiration of the country of their sojourn, be it France or Italy or Germany, for most of them study abroad; but it is to be hoped that they will, after their return to their own beautiful land, find motives for grander and more picturesque studies than these hackneyed Old-World scenes of ours can afford. Mr. Bridgman has painted—and well painted too—the Obsequies of a Mummy upon the Nile, but why could he not as well have gratified us with some equally impressive scene from the life of the pioneers in the Far West, where wondrous landscape and romantic incident might so well combine to furnish a new sensation to the amateurs of London and Paris? Mr. Du Bois deserves our thanks for his View upon the Hudson, and so does Mr. J.B. Bristol for his upon Lake Champlain. The admiration which these two pictures have excited, amongst critics as well as the public, is evidence enough that these two painters, or Mr. Wyatt Eaton or Mr. Swain Gifford or Mr. Bolton Jones, may, if they so will, make American landscape the mode in Europe. Mr. J.M.L. Hamilton has, to say the least, damaged his prospects of success by a strangely inconsiderate choice of subject. Critics do not deny that his Woman in Black is firmly and solidly painted, but they are quite unanimous in the opinion—in which everybody agrees with them—that the composition is in the worst possible taste. I have a vague recollection of having seen this painting in Philadelphia, and Americans may recognize it by the general description of a woman smoking a cigarette and holding her knee with both hands. Altogether, it might have been tolerated in another age and country, which took no offence at the coarse manners of Dutch fairs and merrymakings, but we are not living in the time of the kermesses, and Mr. Hamilton, moreover, is not a Hollander, but a Philadelphian.
The contribution of Sweden, Norway and Denmark may be said to be, upon the whole, less important than that of the United States, and to show, perhaps, less ability in execution; but it has, upon the other hand, the charm of local interest, which the American collection lacks. It is refreshing to meet with these honest, simple little pictures of Scandinavian life, with its typical faces and figures, its costumes and interiors, all so little known to us, and so delightful from their novelty. Amongst the Danish painters we may note especially the names of Exner, Carl Bloch, Kroeger and Bache; and amongst the Swedes, those of Zetterstein, Ross and Hagborg, who follow very closely, in manner and composition, the German school of Düsseldorf.
Art is migratory. If she sojourns to-day in France, it is but as a guest who reposes a while ere she continues her unceasing journey. This reflection—with which we opened our rapid review of the Exhibition in the Champ de Mars—haunts us especially as we linger in the galleries devoted to Holland and Italy. Even in those favored lands, where Art once seemed to have fixed her eternal abode, the inspiration of genius is succeeded by the technical skill of the academician. There are excellent sea-pieces, by Mesdag and Gabriel in the Dutch gallery, but Italy, which has fairly crowded her allotted space with canvases, has nothing to challenge our admiration except a few pretty genre pictures. M. de Nittis—whom, by the way, we are apt to think of as a Parisian, but who is, it appears, Neapolitan—exhibits a dozen pictures quite as modern in conception as the latest scenes from the comedies of Henri Meilhac, and which will, one day, serve as valuable documents in the authentication of the manners and costume of the present epoch. Connoisseurs of the twenty-first century will curiously study our cavalcades in Hyde Park or upon the Brindisi road, the return from the races on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, and the hundred other incidents of our every-day life, certified by the signature of Nittis. Clear and brilliant, too, and full of movement and gayety, are the compositions of MM. Michetti, Mancini and Delleani (A Fête on the Grand Canal, The Return from the Fête of the Madonna, etc.); but the most remarkable of these little Italian masters is Pasini, the Orientalist. His Suburbs of Constantinople and his Promenade in the Garden of the Harem are pictures on which the eye may feast, so finely drawn are their diminutive figures, so wonderful is their variety of intense color—yellow, blue, green, rose—and so clear and transparent withal, startling and amusing us like a display of fireworks.
In the English section are plenty of old acquaintances: we have seen them at Philadelphia, in London and I know not where besides. Frith's Railway Station and Derby Day we all remember, so badly realistic and modern, and the Casual Ward of Fildes—pictures that have gained in England the popularity and success due to veritable works of art, and in Paris the sort of praise we should give to a large colored photograph—if it were well done. This English school is hardly to our taste: Leslie, Leighton, Millais, Orchardson, the painters most in vogue in their own country, have not succeeded in overcoming the cold indifference of the public, who pass through the galleries without caring even to stop. Whence comes the strange disregard for art in a country which lavishes such vast sums for the encouragement of artists? Here are canvases which have been covered with gold, but Parisian criticism treats them as contemptuously as if they were mere chromo-lithographs. The English school is severely condemned for its inharmonious colors, which are either too violent or too cold; for its drawing, which is without what we call distinction; and for that unaccountable light which seems to shine through their figures from within, giving many of the heads the appearance of lanterns. Naturally, Professor Ruskin comes in for his share of this harsh criticism—which, I beg my readers to observe, is not ventured as my own, but is only the echo of the opinion of competent authorities, members of the Institute of France—and the veteran apostle of Pre-Raphaelism is accused of an affected simplicity, and, at the same time, of an offensive and coarse realism, of a mongrel combination of the styles of Courbet and of the old missals, of a want of perspective, and, in short, of all the faults which mark the contemporary English school.
It was only at the last moment that Germany decided to exhibit, and it would be hardly fair to judge of the art of that country by the small number of examples on the walls. There are some paintings by M. Knauss and his followers, however, in whom, if we may accept the opinion of certain connoisseurs, is to be found the true representation of the genius of the land beyond the Rhine. The subjects are invariably peasants or children, rendered according to the monotonous processes of this school, the shape clearly projected upon a dull and sombre ground, the attitudes correct and the gestures faultless, but there is an absence of everything brilliant or striking. No one of the attributes which go to make up a good picture is allowed to assert itself above another: there is an equalization of many talents, sure of themselves, and as incapable of weakness or failure as of telling strokes of genius. One cannot fail to look with curiosity at the Furnace of M. Menzel, a picture of much celebrity in Germany, representing an immense foundry with its massive framework of iron, its machinery and furnaces, the powerful glare of light from a melted casting vividly illuminating the faces and figures of the workmen. Worthy of mention too are the portraits of men by the Bavarian Lembach, and Richter's fine portrait of the beautiful princess Karolath-Beuthen in a ball-dress of white satin, seated by the chimney with an enormous house-dog at her feet. Nor must we omit the Baptism after the Death of the Father by M. Hoff, the chief of the Realistic school, and the landscapes of the two Achembachs and of Breudel and Munthe.
One of the greatest successes of the Exposition has been achieved by Spain. M. Pradilla's remarkable composition representing a passage from the national history—the mad queen Joanna watching by the corpse of her husband, Philip the Handsome—has received a medal of honor. This important painting, which was exhibited at Philadelphia, has attracted so much attention at Madrid during the past two years that the Chambers voted a sum for its acquisition by the state. MM. F. and R. de Madrazzo, father and son, who are well known in America, are also represented, the former (who is director of the Museum of Madrid) by some admirable portraits, one of which is especially noticeable. In a large arm-chair covered in red reclines a very young girl, whose dress, of a light rose-color, is nearly of the same tint as her own delicate complexion, while the red carpet at her feet, the carnations and red geraniums upon the table, all thrown out boldly upon a background of intense blue, produce a strange but wonderfully harmonious effect of color. M. Madrazzo's eldest daughter was the wife of the young and lamented Fortuny, and her bright and lovely face reappears in many, if not in most, of the compositions of her gifted husband.
Fortuny, who sold his first picture to a costermonger in Madrid for a bag of peas, is represented at the Champ de Mars by several canvases, the smallest of which would bring forty thousand francs. His best works are in France. The Wedding at the Vicarage, his chef-d'œuvre, belongs to Madame de Cassin; M. André owns his Serpent-Charmer; and the well-known Choice of a Model and The Judgment-Hall at Granada are in the possession of M. Stewart, the painter's intimate friend, whose collection of Fortuny's works is worth, at the current prices of the day, not less than six hundred thousand francs. Fortuny's painting is indescribable. It has the sparkle of diamonds and rubies and emeralds in the brilliant light of a ball-room. His figures are small, and as minutely elaborated and as highly finished as those of Meissonier himself, whose cherished pupil he was; and I could not but smile, while examining them, at the notion of an enthusiastic young Philadelphian, an almost idolatrous worshipper of Fortuny, that he could imitate this incomparable work by a rapid and free sort of sketching, and all on the faith of two pictures of the master which he had had the happiness to see at an exhibition in Broad street. The immense influence of Fortuny upon the younger contemporary painters of Spain is very apparent in the Exposition. MM. Rico, Simonetti, Domingo, Melida, Casanova vie with each other in their imitation of his manner, but, excellent artists as they are, they are doing so at the expense of originality. The qualities of Fortuny belonged to the nature and temperament of this extraordinary artist, and are not to be acquired by any amount of labor or by any effort of will.
My favorite corner at the Champ de Mars is here before the sparkling little canvases of the Spanish master. But this prodigality of color will sometimes dazzle and fatigue the eye, and turning from it one sees, framed by the heavy red curtains which enclose the Spanish gallery, the immense canvas of the Austrian Hans Makart. This is the Entry of Charles V. into Antwerp. The emperor is surrounded by nearly nude women, who in the midst of horsemen and men-at-arms are offering him flowers and wreaths. These figures, with those of ladies upon balconies gay with flags, and the vast architecture, fill this enormous canvas, which is much larger than even the Catharine Cornaro with which the Philadelphia Exhibition made Americans familiar. The nudity of the women mingled with clothed personages in the streets of a city of the sixteenth century has naturally called forth much adverse criticism, and people have fancied that they saw in it an unworthy attempt to achieve a popular success by means of the scandal; but M. Makart replies that he has respected the truth of history if we are not to disbelieve a contemporary letter of Albert Dürer to Melanchthon. Be this as it may, this great effort receives the applause of the public, notwithstanding the monotonous amber tint which pervades this picture as it did the Catharine Cornaro. Another Austrian, the historical painter Matejko, has received a medal of honor for pictures full of energy, truth and character, though marred by that unaccountable scattering of the light which is a peculiar eccentricity of Austrian painters.
L. Lejeune.
DESERTED.
"WHAT a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be if one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink and shelter! Wouldn't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I've no doubt that this is the true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive."
"But what I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers or what awfully dull people they must have been whose descriptions have so misled the public! It is perfectly unaccountable. Here, I expected to doze all the way across the desert, while, in fact, I've grudged my eyes time enough to wink ever since I left my berth this morning."
"The trouble is," replied her companion, "that persons in search of the picturesque, or with much eye for it, are rare travellers along this route. The people responsible for the descriptions you complain of are thrifty business-men, with no idea that there can be any possible attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut or ore dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I wouldn't give much for a country where there are no wildernesses left."
"But I really think it is rather hard to say in just what the beauty of the desert consists," said Miss Dwyer. "It is so simple. I scribbled two pages of description in my note-book this morning, but when I read them over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may make the ugliest faces beautiful."
The pretty talker is sitting next the window of palace-car No. 30 of the Central Pacific line, which has already been her flying home for two days. The gentleman who sits beside her professes to be sharing the view, but it is only fair I should tell the reader that under this pretence he is nefariously delighting in the rounded contour of his companion's half-averted face as she, in unfeigned engrossment, scans the panorama unrolled before them by the swift motion of the car. How sweet and fresh is the bright tint of her cheek against the ghastly white background of the alkali-patches as they flit by! Still, it can't be said that he isn't enjoying the scenery too, for surely there is no such Claude-Lorraine glass to reflect and enhance the beauty of a landscape as the face of a spirituel girl.
With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer threw herself back in her seat and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far away as the moon.
"I'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said—"a statue which will personify Nevada and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest statue in the world."
"If you'd as lieve put your ideal into a painting I will give you a suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.
"What's that?"
"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."
"That's horrid! You needn't talk to me any more," she exclaimed emphatically.
With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made as rapidly on an overland train as on an ocean steamship, but theirs had dated from the preceding winter, during which they had often met in San Francisco. When Mr. Lombard heard that Miss Dwyer and Mrs. Eustis, her invalid sister, were going East in April, he discovered that he would have business to attend to in New York at about that time; and oddly enough—that is, if you choose to take that view of it—when the ladies came to go it turned out that Lombard had taken his ticket for the selfsame train and identical sleeping-car. The result of which was that he had the privilege of handing Miss Dwyer in and out at the eating-stations, of bringing Mrs. Eustis her cup of tea in the car, and of sharing Miss Dwyer's seat and monopolizing her conversation when he had a mind to, which was most of the time. A bright and congenial companion has this advantage over a book, that he or she is an author whom you can make discourse on any subject you please, instead of being obliged to follow an arbitrary selection by another, as when you commune with the printed page.
By way of peace-offering for his blasphemy in calling the Nevada desert a leper, Lombard had embezzled a couple of chairs from the smoking-room and carried them to the rear platform of the car, which happened to be the last of the train, and invited Miss Dwyer to come thither and see the scenery. Whether she had wanted to pardon him or not, he knew very well that this was a temptation which she could not resist, for the rear platform was the best spot for observation on the entire train, unless it were the cowcatcher of the locomotive.
The April sun mingled with the frosty air like whiskey with ice-water, producing an effect cool but exhilarating. As she sat in the door of the little passage leading to the platform she scarcely needed the shawl which he wrapped about her with absurdly exaggerated solicitude. One of the most unmistakable symptoms of the lover is the absorbing and superfluous care with which he adjusts the wraps about the object of his affections whether the weather be warm or cold: it is as if he thought he could thus artificially warm her heart toward him. But Miss Dwyer did not appear vexed, pretending indeed to be oblivious of everything else in admiration of the spectacle before her.
The country stretched flat and bare as a table for fifty miles on either side the track—a distance looking in the clear air not over one-fifth as great. On every side this great plain was circled by mountains, the reddish-brown sides of some of them bare to the summits, while others were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the brown of the dry earth and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were the greatest wonder. It was as if the skies, taking pity on their nakedness, had draped their majestic shoulders in imperial purple, while at this hour the westering sun tipped their pinnacles with gilt. In the distance half a dozen sand-spouts, swiftly-moving white pillars, looking like desert genii with too much "tanglefoot" aboard, were careering about in every direction.
But as Lombard pointed out the various features of the scene to his companion, I fear that his chief motive was less an admiration of Nature that sought sympathy than a selfish delight in making her eyes flash, seeing the color come and go in her cheeks, and hearing her charming unstudied exclamations of pleasure—a delight not unmingled with complacency in associating himself in her mind with emotions of delight and admiration. It is appalling, the extent to which spoony young people make the admiration of Nature in her grandest forms a mere sauce to their lovemaking. The roar of Niagara has been notoriously utilized as a cover to unlimited osculation, and Adolphus looks up at the sky-cleaving peak of Mont Blanc only to look down at Angelina's countenance with a more vivid appreciation of its superior attractions.
It was delicious, Lombard thought, sitting there with her on the rear platform, out of sight and sound of everybody. He had such a pleasant sense of proprietorship in her! How agreeable—flatteringly so, in fact—she had been all day! There was nothing like travelling together to make people intimate. It was clear that she understood his intentions very well: indeed, how could she help it? He had always said that a fellow had shown himself a bungler at lovemaking if he were not practically assured of the result before he came to the point of the declaration. The sensation of leaving everything else so rapidly behind that people have when sitting on the rear platform of a train of cars makes them feel, by force of contrast, nearer to each other and more identified. How pretty she looked sitting there in the doorway, her eyes bent so pensively on the track behind as the car-wheels so swiftly reeled it off! He had tucked her in comfortably. No cold could get to the sweet little girl, and none ever should so long as he lived to make her comfort his care.
One small gloved hand lay on her lap outside the shawl. What a jolly little hand it was! He reached out his own and took it, but, without even a moment's hesitation for him to extract a flattering inference from, she withdrew it. Perhaps something in his matter-of-course way displeased her.
To know when it is best to submit to a partial rebuff, rather than make a bad matter worse by trying to save one's pride, is a rare wisdom. Still, Lombard might have exercised it at another time. But there are days when the magnetisms are all wrong, and a person not ordinarily deficient in tact, having begun wrong, goes on blundering like a schoolboy. Piqued at the sudden shock to the pleasant day-dream, in which he had fancied himself already virtually assured of this young lady—a day-dream which she was not really accountable for spoiling, since she had not been privy to it—what should he do but find expression for his mingled vexation and wounded affection by reminding her of a previous occasion on which she had allowed him the liberty she now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now. Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to ignore what they see fit to forget.
"You have forgotten that evening at the California Theatre," was what this devoted youth said.
"I'm sure I don't know to what you refer, sir," she replied freezingly.
He was terrified at the distant accent of her voice. It appeared to come from somewhere beyond the fixed stars, and brought the chill of the interstellar spaces with it. He forgot in an instant all about his pique, vexation and wounded pride, and was in a panic of anxiety to bring her back. In a moment more he knew that she would rise from her chair and remark that it was getting cold and she must go in. If he allowed her to depart in that mood he might lose her for ever. He could think of but one way of convincing her instantaneously of his devotion; and so what should he do but take the most inopportune occasion in the entire course of their acquaintance to make his declaration? He was like a general whose plan of battle has been completely deranged by an utterly unexpected repulse in a preliminary movement, compelling him to hurry forward his last reserves in a desperate attempt to restore the battle.
"What have I done, Miss Dwyer? Don't you know that I love you? Won't you be my wife?"
"No, sir," she said flatly, her taste outraged and her sensibilities set on edge by the stupid, blundering, hammer-and-tongs onset which from first to last he had made. She loved him, and had meant to accept him, but if she had loved him ten times as much she couldn't have helped refusing him just then, under those circumstances—not if she died for it. As she spoke she rose and disappeared within the car.
It is certainly to be hoped that the noise of the wheels, which out on the platform was considerable, prevented the recording angel from getting the full force of Lombard's ejaculation.
It is bad enough to be refused when the delicacy and respectfulness of the lady's manner make "No" sound so much like "Yes" that the rejected lover can almost persuade himself that his ears have deceived him. It is bad enough to be refused when she does it so timidly and shrinkingly and deprecatingly that it might be supposed she were the rejected party. It is bad enough to be refused when she expresses the hope that you will always be friends, and shows a disposition to make profuse amends in general agreeableness for the consummate favor which she is forced to decline you. Not to put too fine a point upon it, it is bad enough to be refused anyhow you can arrange the circumstances, but to be refused as Lombard had been, with a petulance as wounding to his dignity as was the refusal itself to his affections, is to take a bitter pill with an asafœtida coating.
In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left the only clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the platform, and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within when at dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for supper. Then he went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to return to the sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the train reached Ogden the next morning; instead of going on East he would take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him on this trip was at an end.
About an hour after leaving the supper-station the train suddenly stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had become disarranged which it would take some time to put right. Glad to improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread, bare, level and white as an ice-bound polar sea, to the feet of the far-off mountains.
Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk drifting in an entangled mass of débris. Of course she had a perfect right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband, but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and, grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being left alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have caught the train without difficulty if his foot had not happened to catch in a tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he gathered himself up the train was a hundred yards off, and moving rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.
"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no one on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the rattle of the wheels were sufficient to render a much louder noise than he could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter of the train faded into a distant roar and its lights began to twinkle into indistinctness.
"Damnation!"
A voice fell like a falling star: "Gentlemen do not use profane language in ladies' company."
He first looked up in the air, as on the whole the likeliest quarter for a voice to come from in this desert, then around. Just on the other side of the track stood Miss Dwyer, smiling with a somewhat constrained attempt at self-possession. Lombard was a good deal taken aback, but in his surprise he did not forget that this was the young lady who had refused him that afternoon.
"I beg your pardon," he replied with a stiff bow: "I did not suppose that there were any ladies within hearing."
"I got out of the car supposing there was plenty of time to get a specimen of sagebrush to carry home," she explained, "but when the cars started, although I was but a little way off, I could not regain the platform;" which, considering that she wore a tie-back of the then prevalent fashion, was not surprising.
"Indeed!" replied Lombard with the same formal manner.
"But won't the train come back for us?" she asked in a more anxious voice.
"That will depend on whether we are missed. Nobody will miss me. Mrs. Eustis, if she hasn't gone to bed, may miss you."
"But she has. She went to bed before I left the car, and is asleep by this time."
"That's unfortunate," was his brief reply as he lit a cigar and began to smoke and contemplate the stars.
His services, so far as he could do anything for her, she should, as a lady, command, but if she thought that he was going to do the agreeable after what had happened a couple of hours ago, she was mightily mistaken.
There was a silence, and then she said, hesitatingly, "What are we going to do?"
He glanced at her. Her attitude and the troubled expression of her face as well as her voice indicated that the logic of the situation was overthrowing the jaunty self-possession which she had at first affected. The desert was staring her out of countenance. How his heart yearned toward her! If she had only given him a right to take care of her, how he would comfort her! what prodigies would he be capable of to succor her! But this rising impulse of tenderness was turned to choking bitterness by the memory of that scornful "No, sir." So he replied, coldly, "I'm not in the habit of being left behind in deserts, and I don't know what is customary to do in such cases. I see nothing except to wait for the next train, which will come along some time within twenty-four hours."
There was another long silence, after which she said in a timid voice, "Hadn't we better walk to the next station?"
At the suggestion of walking he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly answered, "It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to the first station."
Several minutes passed before she spoke again, and then she said, with an accent almost like that of a child in trouble and about to cry, "I'm cold."
The strong, unceasing wind, blowing from snowy mountain-caverns across a plain on which there was not the slightest barrier of hill or tree to check its violence, was indeed bitterly cold, and Lombard himself felt chilled to the marrow of his bones. He took off his overcoat and offered it to her.
"No," said she, "you are as cold as I am."
"You will please take it," he replied in a peremptory manner; and she took it.
"At this rate we shall freeze to death before midnight," he added as if in soliloquy. "I must see if I can't contrive to make some sort of a shelter with this sagebrush."
He began by tearing up a large number of bushes by the roots. Seeing what he was doing, Miss Dwyer was glad to warm her stiffened muscles by taking hold and helping; which she did with a vigor that shortly reduced her gloves to shreds and filled her fingers with scratches from the rough twigs. Lombard next chose an unusually high and thick clump of brush, and cleared a small space three feet across in the centre of it, scattering twigs on the uncovered earth to keep off its chill.
"Now, Miss Dwyer, if you will step inside this spot, I think I can build up the bushes around us so as to make a sort of booth which may save us from freezing."
She silently did as he directed, and he proceeded to pile the brush which they had torn up on the tops of the bushes left standing around the spot where they were, thus making a circular wall about three feet high. Over the top he managed to draw together two or three bushes, and the improvised wigwam was complete.
The moonlight penetrated the loose roof sufficiently to reveal to each other the faces and figures of the two occupants as they sat in opposite corners as far apart as possible, she cold and miserable, he cold and sulky, and both silent. And, as if to mock him, the idea kept recurring to his mind how romantic and delightful, in spite of the cold and discomfort, the situation would be if she had only said Yes, instead of No, that afternoon. People have odd notions sometimes, and it actually seemed to him that his vexation with her for destroying the pleasure of the present occasion was something quite apart and in addition to his main grievance against her. It might have been so jolly, and now she had spoiled it. He could have boxed her pretty little ears.
She wondered why he did not try to light a fire, but she wouldn't ask him another thing if she died. In point of fact, he knew the sagebrush would not burn. Suddenly the wind blew fiercer, there came a rushing sound, and the top and walls of the wigwam were whisked off like a flash, and as they staggered to their feet, buffeted by the whirling bushes, a cloud of fine alkali-dust enveloped them, blinding their eyes, penetrating their ears and noses, and setting them gasping, sneezing and coughing spasmodically. Then, like a puff of smoke, the suffocating storm was dissipated, and when they opened their smarting eyes there was nothing but the silent, glorious desolation of the ghostly desert around them, with the snow-peaks in the distance glittering beneath the moon. A sand-spout had struck them, that was all—one of the whirling dust-columns which they had admired all day from the car-windows.
Wretched enough before both for physical and sentimental reasons, this last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must be done. Whether anything could be done or not, something must be done.
"Don't leave me," she cried hysterically as he rushed off to reconnoitre the vicinity.
"I'll return presently," he called back.
But five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and he did not come back. Terror dried her tears, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had quite given him up for lost, and herself too, when with inexpressible relief she heard him call to her. She replied, and in a moment more he was at her side, breathless with running.
"I lost my bearings," he said. "If you had not answered me I could not have found you."
"Don't leave me again," she sobbed, clinging to his arm.
He put his arms round her and kissed her. It was mean, base, contemptible to take advantage of her agitation in that way, but she did not resist, and he did it again and again—I forbear to say how many times.
"Isn't it a perfectly beautiful night?" he exclaimed with a fine gush of enthusiasm.
"Isn't it exquisite?" she echoed with a rush of sympathetic feeling.
"See those stars: they look as if they had just been polished," he cried.
"What a droll idea!" she exclaimed gleefully. "But do see that lovely mountain."
Holding her with a firmer clasp, and speaking with what might be styled a fierce tenderness, he demanded, "What did you mean, miss, by refusing me this afternoon?"
"What did you go at me so stupidly for? I had to refuse," she retorted smilingly.
"Will you be my wife?"
"Yes, sir: I meant to be all the time."
The contract having been properly sealed, Lombard said, with a countenance curiously divided between a tragical expression and a smile of fatuous complacency, "There was a clear case of poetical justice in your being left behind in the desert to-night. To see the lights of the train disappearing, leaving you alone in the midst of desolation, gave you a touch of my feeling on being rejected this afternoon. Of all leavings behind, there's none so miserable as the experience of the rejected lover."
"Poor fellow! so he shouldn't be left behind. He shall be conductor of the train," she said with a bewitching laugh. His response was not verbal.
"How cold the wind is!" she said.
"Shall I build you another wigwam?"
"No: let us exercise a little. You whistle 'The Beautiful Blue Danube,' and we'll waltz. This desert is the biggest, jolliest ball-room floor that ever was, and I dare say we shall be the first to waltz on it since the creation of the world. That will be something to boast of when we get home. Come, let's dedicate the Great American Desert to Terpsichore."
They stepped out from among the ruins of their sagebrush booth upon a patch of hard bare earth close to the railroad track. Lombard puckered his lips and struck up the air, and off they went with as much enthusiasm as if inspired by a first-class orchestra. Round and round, to and fro, they swept until, laughing, flushed and panting, they came to a stop.
It was then that they first perceived that they were not without a circle of appreciative spectators. Sitting like statues on their sniffing, pawing ponies, a dozen Piute Indians encircled them. Engrossed with the dance and with each other, they had not noticed them as they rode up, attracted from their route by this marvellous spectacle of a pale-face squaw and brave engaged in a solitary war-dance in the midst of the desert.
At sight of the grim circle of centaurs around them Miss Dwyer would have fainted but for Lombard's firm hold.
"Pretend not to see them: keep on dancing," he hissed in her ear. He had no distinct plan in what he said, but spoke merely from an instinct of self-preservation, which told him that when they stopped the Indians would be upon them. But as she mechanically, and really more dead than alive, obeyed his direction and resumed the dance, and he in his excitement was treading on her feet at every step, the thought flashed upon him that there was a bare chance of escaping violence if they could keep the Indians interested without appearing to notice their presence. In successive whispers he communicated his idea to Miss Dwyer: "Don't act as if you saw them at all, but do everything as if we were alone. That will puzzle them, and may make them think us supernatural beings, or perhaps crazy: Indians have great respect for crazy people. It's our only chance. We will stop dancing now, and sing a while. Give them a burlesque of opera. I'll give you the cues and show you how. Don't be frightened. I don't believe they'll touch us so long as we act as if we didn't see them. Do you understand? Can you do your part?"
"I understand: I'll try," she whispered.
"Now," he said, and as they separated he threw his hat on the ground, and, assuming an extravagantly languishing attitude, burst forth in a most poignant burlesque of a lovelorn tenor's part, rolling his eyes, clasping his hands, striking his breast, and gyrating about Miss Dwyer in the most approved operatic style. He had a fine voice and knew a good deal of music; so that, barring a certain nervousness in the performer, the exhibition was really not bad. In his singing he had used a meaningless gibberish varied with the syllables of the scale, but he closed by singing the words, "Are you ready now? Go ahead, then."
With that she took it up, and rendered the prima donna quite as effectively, interjecting "The Last Rose of Summer" as an aria in a manner that would have been encored in San Francisco. He responded with a few staccato notes, and the scene ended by their rushing into each other's arms and waltzing down the stage with abandon.
The Indians sat motionless on their horses, not even exchanging comments among themselves. They were evidently too utterly astonished by the goings on before them to have any other sentiment as yet beyond pure amazement. Here were two richly-dressed pale-faces, such as only lived in cities, out in the middle of an uninhabitable desert, in the freezing midnight, having a variety and minstrel show all to themselves, and, to make the exhibition the more unaccountable, without apparently seeing their auditors at all. Had they started up the show after being captured, Indian cunning would have recognized in it a device to save their lives, but the two had been at it before the party rode up—had, in fact, first attracted attention by their gyrations, which were visible for miles out on the moony plain.
Lombard, without ever letting his eyes rest a moment on the Indians so as to indicate that he saw them, had still managed by looks askance and sweeping glances to keep close watch upon their demeanor, and noted with prodigious relief that his wild scheme was succeeding better than he had dared to hope. Without any break in the entertainment he communicated his reassurance to Miss Dwyer by singing, to the tune of "My Country, 'tis of Thee," the following original hymn:
"We're doing admir'blee—
They're heap much tickledee:
Only keep on."
To which she responded, to the lugubrious air of "John Brown's Body,"
"Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,
Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,
Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,
When we can sing no more?"
A thing may be ridiculous without being amusing, and neither of these two felt the least inclination to smile at each other's poetry. After duly joining in the chorus of "Glory, Hallelujah!" Lombard endeavored to cheer his companion by words adapted to the inspiriting air of "Rally Round the Flag, Boys," This was followed by a series of popular airs, with solos, duets and choruses.
But this sort of thing could not go on for ever. Lombard was becoming exhausted in voice and legs, and as for Miss Dwyer, he was expecting to see her drop from moment to moment. Indeed, to the air of "'Way Down upon the S'wanee River" she now began to sing,
"Oh dear! I can't bear up much longer:
I'm tired to death;
My voice's gone all to pie-ee-ee-ces,
My throat is very sore."
They must inevitably give out in a few minutes, and then he—and, terribly worse, she—would be at the mercy of these bestial savages, and this seeming farce would turn into most revolting tragedy. With this sickening conviction coming over him, Lombard cast a despairing look around the horizon to see if there were no help in their bitter extremity. Suddenly he burst forth, to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner:"
"Oh, say can you see,
Far away to the east,
A bright star that doth grow
Momentarily brighter?
'Tis the far-flashing headlight
Of a railroad-train:
Ten minutes from now
We shall be safe and sound."
What they did in those ten minutes neither could tell afterward. The same idea was in both their minds—that unless the attention of the Indians could be held until the train arrived, its approach would only precipitate their own fate by impelling the savages to carry out whatever designs of murder, insult or capture they might have. Under the influence of the intense excitement of this critical interval it is to be feared that the performance degenerated from a high-toned concert and variety show into something very like a Howling-Dervish exhibition. But, at any rate, it answered its purpose until, after a period that seemed like a dozen eternities, the West-bound overland express with a tremendous roar and rattle drew up beside them, in response to the waving of Miss Dwyer's handkerchief and to Lombard's shouts.
Even had the Indians contemplated hostile intentions—which they were doubtless in a condition of too great general stupefaction to do—the alacrity with which the two performers clambered aboard the cars would probably have foiled their designs. But as the train gathered headway once more Lombard could not resist the temptation of venting his feelings by shaking his fist ferociously at the audience which he had been so conscientiously trying to please up to that moment. It was a gratification which had like to have cost him dear. There was a quick motion on the part of one of the Indians, and the conductor dragged Lombard within the car just as an arrow struck the door.
Mrs. Eustis had slept sweetly all night, and was awakened the next morning an hour before the train reached Ogden by the sleeping-car porter, who gave her a telegram which had overtaken the train at the last station. It read:
"Am safe and sound. Was left behind by your train last night, and picked up by West-bound express. Will join you at Ogden to-morrow morning."
"Jennie Dwyer."
Mrs. Eustis read the telegram through twice without getting the least idea from it. Then she leaned over and looked down into Jennie's berth. It had not been slept in. Then she began to understand. Heroically resisting a tendency to scream, she thus secured space for second thought, and, being a shrewd woman of the world, ended by making up her mind to tell no one about the matter. Evidently, Jennie had been having some decidedly unconventional experience, and the less publicity given to all such passages in young ladies' lives the better for their prospects. It so happened that in the bustle attending the approach to the terminus and the prospective change of cars everybody was too busy to notice that any passengers were missing. At Ogden, Mrs. Eustis left the train and went to a hotel. The following morning, a few minutes after the arrival of the Central Pacific train, Jennie Dwyer walked into her room, Lombard having stopped at the office to secure berths for the three to Omaha by the Union Pacific. After Jennie had given an outline account of her experiences, and Mrs. Eustis's equilibrium had been measurably restored by proper use of the smelling-salts, the latter lady remarked, "And so Mr. Lombard was alone with you there all night? It's very unfortunate that it should have happened so."
"Why, I was thinking it very fortunate," replied Jennie with her most child-like expression. "If Mr. Lombard had not been there, I should either have frozen to death or by this time been celebrating my honeymoon as bride of a Piute chief."
"Nonsense, child! You know what I mean. People will talk: such unpleasant things will be said! I wouldn't have had it happen for anything. And when you were under my charge too! Do hand me my salts."
"If people are going to say unpleasant things because I pass a night alone with Mr. Lombard," remarked Jennie with a mischievous smile, "you must prepare yourself to hear a good deal said, my dear, for I presume this won't be the last time it will happen. We're engaged to be married."
Edward Bellamy.
RAMBLING TALK ABOUT THE NEGRO.
WHAT guides the bee when, turning from the "suck," he wheels in air and strikes his wonderful line for the "gum"? Heaven knows. And by what process does the negro calculate the shortest distance between the point he occupies and the place he would be? That also is a mystery, yet the least observant person familiar with the negro cannot have failed to note his wonderful—we had almost said his preternatural—power to discover, without guide or compass, the shortest possible distance between two given places—to make, as he calls it, a "near cut."
To the right of us lay a berry and wild-fruit tract, on our left was a large village, and our farm was in a certain portion skirted by an old field, through which the negroes had discovered the most direct path to market. At dawn they could be seen winding around the brow of the hill, men, women and children, with baskets on their heads and buckets on their arms, singly and in couples, sometimes three, four or a half dozen together. And how they stole from us! It seemed impossible to prevent, or even limit, their depredations.
One evening Mr. Smith said to me, "The man Tony is sentenced to be hung."
Tony was a village negro accused of murder, and as he had been confined in the village jail and tried at the village court-house, the case naturally created some excitement in our quiet neighborhood.
"Oh, I am so sorry!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, poor devil!" said Mr. Smith. "But it was a clear case. He belonged to Mr. Lamkin before the surrender, and the old man made every effort to get him off—employed the very best counsel. I am sorry for him, but the wind which is so ill for him will blow us good. He is to be hung in the old field that edges our farm, and after the execution takes place we shall have no more negro trespassers in that quarter. I very much doubt whether I shall be able to obtain hands to work that portion of the land."
It would require a psychological study of the negro character to enable one to explain the spirit in which they flocked to the execution of their comrade, their friend, in some instances their kinsman. They came in holiday attire and with hurrying steps, and long before the hour appointed the adjoining fence was crowded with eager spectators, and, like flocks of blackbirds, they had filled every tree within five hundred yards, chatting and bustling and moving around with no apparent emotion except the desire to see.
At length the cart appeared on the brow of the hill, and every neck was craned for a glimpse of the poor creature who sat on the coffin—a pitiful-looking, half-dwarf mulatto, who gave you the idea of deformity and distress without your being able to tell why. He walked bravely to his place on the scaffold, singing and praying, protesting his innocence and bequeathing forgiveness to his enemies, apparently full of faith, like many others who by reason of weariness and despair have attained resignation; but the fictitious piety born of nervous excitement, and the abnormal elevation of feeling induced by continued spiritual exhortation during weeks of unrest and suspense, both gave way when his old mother, unsightly and pitiful as himself, asked leave to bid him good-bye, and came tottering to his side, saying as well as she could for the tears that choked her, "Oh, Tony! mammy ain't gwine back on you! Mammy don't b'lieve you done it, she don't keer who 'kuses you. Good-bye, my baby! good-bye! 'Twon't be long 'fo' mammy jines you an' daddy whar dar ain't no onjestice an' no mizry. Mammy ain't gwine to stay here long arter you goes."
He threw up his arms with a wild, sobbing cry: "Oh, mammy! mammy! can't you do nothin' fer me? Ain't you got no way to he'p me? Oh, de sun do shine so pretty, an' de leaves shakes 'bout on de trees so natchul! An' I nuvver knowed de birds to sing like dey does to-day. It ain't fa'r—no, it's not fa'r to shet me up in de groun' for what I ain't done. So many 'ginst one, an' me so little an' so po'! I ain't got a fren' on top o' de yuth. Nary one outen all dese folks, what I use ter go to shuckin's wid 'em, an' play de banjer, an' hunt possums—nary one uv 'em didn't stand up for me an' try to git me off! Not eben you, mammy, didn't try to git in jail an' gimme somethin' to wu'k my way out, an' I a-lis'nin' night an' day! Night an' day, an' you nuvver come!"
"Lord! Lord! my baby!" sobbed the poor old thing, her trembling limbs hardly able to sustain the feeble frame. "What could yo' ole mammy do 'ginst all dem folks? Ef Mars' Henry couldn't make 'em let you 'lone, what could a po' ole nigger do what ain't got no money, an' no sense, an' no fren's? Lord! Lord! my blessed chile!" she sobbed, the tears raining down her withered black cheeks, "ef mammy had a hundred nakes she would put dat rope 'roun' 'em all to keep it off o' your'n."
That was true, poor soul! but could avail nothing, and the appointed sentence was carried into execution. The soul of the boy returned to its Creator and its Judge, and the old mother was taken to her cabin almost as lifeless as the body that swung in the air half a mile away.
If the fact that they flocked to the place of execution cannot be ascribed to any idiosyncrasy of the negro race, it was curious to see how they were afterward overwhelmed with superstitious fear. We had no more trouble about the melons and grapes. The negroes found another route to the village market, and the little well-worn path became overgrown with grass and ox-eyed daisies, like the rest of the old field. Even after the body had been buried far off and the scaffold removed, in broad daylight they shunned the place, but at dusk or after dark neither bribery nor persuasion could have induced one of them to go near it. Mr. Smith tried some of them.
"But what the d——l are you afraid of?" he asked impatiently.
"I dunno, sir," returned one of the men doggedly. "All I does know is, I ain't gwine (no disrespek, sir). But when a man is took off dat onnateral kind o' way, de sperrit is always hangin' 'roun', tryin' to git back whar it come from."
"But Tony is buried a mile away."
"I can't help dat, sir. De sperrit were let out in de ole field, an' maybe it don't know whar to find the pusson it 'longs to. Anyhow, ef it come back dar lookin' for Tony, I gwine take good keer it don't find me!"
An amusing eccentricity of feeling, certainly a very nice distinction, was shown during slave times by a woman belonging to a friend of ours. Some disturbance had taken place on the premises of a neighbor, Mr. H——, who, being a severe old man, forthwith forbade that any negro should again visit his place. This result was very dispiriting to Judy, the slave above referred to, for she had a cousin belonging to Mr. H—— to whom she was in the habit of paying frequent visits, and for whom she felt undoubtedly very great affection; and as time passed and Mr. H—— continued implacable, her indignation grew and her wrath waxed exceeding strong. It came to pass that the cousin one night fared over-sumptuously on cold cabbage and beans, and when the mists of dawn had fled she too had left to join her friends over Jordan.
Presently a messenger came from Mr. H——: "Would Mrs. S—— be so kind as to allow Judy to come over and prepare the body for burial?"—that being one of Judy's specialties.
The family was at table when the message was delivered, and Judy was serving cakes and muffins, with short parentheses sacred to the memory of her cousin. Mrs. S—— had respected her affliction and given her permission to retire, but Judy continued to return with more cakes and more muffins, and, as soon as they were handed, to retire to a corner with her apron at her eyes, even after Mr. H——'s message had been delivered and she had been told to go. During one of her temporary absences Mr. S—— asked his wife, "Why don't you tell her to go, if she is going? It seems nobody can be 'laid out' without Judy, but any of the rest can wait at table."
"But this is her cousin, and she may not wish to perform so trying a service; so I will leave it to her.—Judy, if you prefer not going to Mr. H——'s just at present, I will send word that I cannot spare you."
Judy threw her apron over her head with a vari-toned cry issued in the keys of grief, anger and scorn. Then she stiffened her neck and rolled her eyes from side to side till the whites glistened again. "Go dar, indeed!" she indignantly exclaimed. "Ef I couldn't go on de lot to see my own dear cousin, I know I ain't gwine to dress up his dead nigger!"
The leading trait of the negro is his instability, his superficiality. It is superlative. His emotions are as easily aroused and as evanescent as those of children, flowing in a noisy and tumultuous current, but utterly without depth and volatile as ether. To this may in a measure be attributed his lack of progress, but I doubt whether he be capable of any high order of development without an infusion of Caucasian blood which will dissipate his simian type, improving the shape of his retreating forehead, changing the contour of his heavy jaw, giving weight and measurement to his now inferior and inactive brain. Since the surrender and the institution of public schools, and the opportunities for improvement afforded him, we seem to have all around us evidence of this utter instability of character. Never since the world began has he had, and never will he have again, the incentives and aids to improvement which at that time fell into his hands. There was, as one spur to ambition, the spirit of resentment which he was supposed naturally to entertain at having been kept in servitude by even the kindest of masters; but the negro is amiable and forgiving, and not only during but after the war conducted himself with admirable good feeling and moderation. Granting, then, that he indulged no feeling of resentment, there must have been, should have been, there was, a sentiment of rivalry with the whites which was pardonable and proper to the most amiable and forgiving nature; and at first the young negroes applied themselves with assiduity, and learned with an avidity which delighted some classes, and was no doubt a discomfiting surprise to others. It was astonishing to see the rapidity with which they mastered the alphabet of progress, and white mothers said to their indolent or refractory children, "Are you not ashamed to see little negroes more studious than yourself, making even greater progress according to their advantages, and in matters with which you should be already familiar?"
As time went on even the indolent or refractory white boy to some extent improved, and seemed conditionally sure of further improvement; but the negro, having arrived at a certain point—and that usually no high one—seemed incapable of further progress, as a man, though not afflicted with dimness of vision, is prevented by natural causes from seeing beyond the horizon. Doubtless the spirit of rivalry already mentioned, born of defiance and resentment in a mild form, was to some extent the incentive to application, and its brief duration serves to illustrate the instability of which we speak. Doubtless, also, many others, by reason of poverty, which necessitated manual labor, were unable to continue the pursuit of an education to any great advantage; but what numbers of white children, by the losses of war placed on the same footing—placed identically on the same footing, because they also and their parents were compelled to earn by labor their daily bread—have yet continued to improve! The negro had the same privilege of night study and (immediately after the war) as many teachers at his service as any white child. He had also one advantage over the white: he had never learned the difference between meum and tuum, and the silver lining to this cloud of ignorance lay in the fact that he was thereby enabled more speedily to increase his store of worldly goods, thus leaving time for greater devotion to the particular of mental development.
But take the minority of instances, where every advantage has been given him; where, freed from the relations of master and slave, he has been thrown with whites and the spirit of emulation naturally excited; where his parents have made every sacrifice necessary to procure him tutors (numbers of them had private teachers, and very competent ones too, just after the war) and books and all the paraphernalia of learning, and even the best social position possible to him in the section where he happened to be, themselves retreating into the background with the pathetic humility and self-abnegation of parents who believe and desire their offspring to be of a higher order than themselves,—does the highest culture of which he seems capable make him more than the peer of the mediocre white? I and hundreds of others have read with pleasure the speech of Rev. William D. Johnson, A.M., colored delegate to the Methodist Episcopal Conference which some months ago met in Georgia. It was a good speech for a colored man—a capitally, wonderfully good speech—and I applaud it with cordial pleasure and reciprocation of the good feeling which pervades it; but is it more than the address of the average white? As the address of any one of the white members would it have been reported, or have attracted attention, save for its animus?
There are exceptional cases among the negroes as among the whites; but because we have a Cuvier, a Webster, a Dupuytren, are we prepared to assert as a general fact that the brain of the white man weighs sixty-four ounces? And I speak of the negroes as a class. I refer to the negro of the South, not to the barbarian of Africa, who really exists, nor to the negro of the Northern mind, who is only "founded on fact." I refer to the negro as he is in our day and generation, not as he will or may be after centuries of revolution in his circumstances which will produce Heaven knows what changes in his mental, moral and physical nature. Many believe that these negroes, whom and whose children we have civilized, having with their freedom received ideas of social equality and personal ambition which except in isolated cases can never be realized on this continent, will gradually return, as in South Carolina they are now doing, to their original land, and thus eventually civilize their own race. Were they to return in a body, they would all probably relapse into barbarism, but if a clear stream be kept running, though the pool through which it flow be stagnant, it will in time become pure. And there is material in this country for a pretty continuous flow.
I do not say that the negro is incapable of progress, but his mental horizon is very limited, and seems bounded by natural causes as immovable (except by aid of foreign blood, which having he ceases to be a genuine negro) as the chains of mountains which in some localities limit the horizon in material Nature; and that as a people they will become the peer of the white race is simply impossible, for if progress be a law of Nature, it will be obeyed by the white man also, and he is already centuries ahead of the black, with advantages of every possible nature. Also, that they should now be competent to fill the offices many of them occupy is a pure absurdity, as demonstrated all around us—at the polls, in the jury-box, in the chair of the magistrate. A very cruel absurdity it has sometimes proved.
But speaking of their mercurial nature: I was once spending the summer at a village in the mountains, and not far from my chamber-window were three or four cabins occupied by very cleanly, orderly negroes, who had hitherto been a source of no annoyance, for I am very fond of negroes and like to have them about me. These cabins were situated near the mouth of a deep ravine heavily wooded and producing echoes of beautiful distinctness. One evening negroes began to assemble in and around the largest cabin, and there was evidently to be a meeting of some very mournful—or at any rate solemn—character, for they came quietly, shook hands silently, and crept into their places with a stealthy gliding motion. It was a weird, uncanny scene. The moon rose slowly behind the great black mountains, and cast its rays upon the tree-tops and shimmered its light on the whitewashed cabins, and only half revealed the dark figures that glided like spectres in and out; but nothing could pierce the depths of that black ravine, and it was easy to believe it the abode of spirits blest or otherwise—especially otherwise. There was a long, oppressive silence: then they began to sing. What remarkable voices they have, especially the men—so full, so rich, so deep and sonorous! If the mental development of the negro is to involve change in his physical conformation, it is to be hoped it will not interfere with his chest and lungs, nor with that wonderful cavern in the back of his mouth and at the base of the nose. Some should be kept barbarians that they may continue to be vocal instruments. No one who has heard him only as a "minstrel" can have any conception of the exquisite mournfulness, the agonizing pathos, which the negro voice is capable of expressing; nor, we may fairly add, of the wild, devil-may-care jollity; but this last is more truly represented on the stage, the invariable adjuncts of caricature not only contributing to stimulate the comedian, but broadening the effect of his voice on the hearer. Why is it that we always have caricature in negro delineations—that we never have any simple representations of the reality or any touches of unalloyed pathos? In all Nature there is nothing more pathetic than a pitiful negro. You may paint the negro's lips and roach his hair, and even exaggerate the peculiarities of his feet, but I can pick you up one, out on the suburbs or down in the alleys, who has become old and feeble and cannot work any more, whose old master is dead and whose children have kicked him out, who steals and struggles and starves in ignorant terror of the poorhouse; and for yours people will raise their opera-glasses to their eyes—for mine, their handkerchiefs.
But to return. Oh how inexpressibly mournful were their chants that night! I remember one especially. It began with a wailing recitative—a prolonged, mournful recitative in the minor key by female voices only, and at its close the men joined them in a full, deep chorus, slow and solemn, the last words of which were "Dead and gone!" The black ravine took up the sound, and from its deep, mysterious heart came back the solemn echo, "Dead and gone!" It was simply horrible. I never felt so homesick in my life; and as the mournful chant rolled toward the mountain, and then came floating back again like a corpse upon the ebbing tide, I leaned my head upon the window-sill and cried heartily. One by one my friends died and were buried, my children became orphans, and, by a curious freak of circumstances, their father and I were left to a childless old age. All possible accidents were put in requisition, all manner of possible misfortunes called upon to contribute their quota of woe. Then I fell to wondering how people could like to sing mournful things and make themselves and other people miserable; and that made me think of what negroes liked, and that naturally led to watermelons; so I dried my eyes and summoned my maid: "Betty, what is it they are singing about? Is anybody dead?"
"It's de las' en' of a funerul, I b'lieve, m'm—somebody whar dey didn't git done preachin' over him, 'count of a storm."
"Betty, the singing does make me feel so badly. Just step over and say I will send them a barrel of watermelons and cantaloupes, and those Mrs. Brown sent me too, if they will get up a dance or make any kind of cheerful noise. There is a tambourine among the children's toys: you can beat it as you go."
Betty laughed, and went over. There was a pause in the singing: then I heard a man's voice: "Go 'way wid dat fool talk! Whar she gwine git watermillions an' mushmillions by de bar'l, an' dey ain't more'n fa'rly ripe?"
"Mr. Smith sent 'em from de city," simpered Betty, who liked to put on airs with the country-folk; "an' Mrs. Brown, of your nabority, reposed her some to-day."
"Dat's so 'bout dem from town, 'cos I helped to tote 'em up to de house," said another.
"Huk kum she ain't et 'em?"
"The baby conwulshed, an' Mrs. Smith's mind disbegaged of de melons," replied Betty.
"Huk kum he sen' so many?" asked the first speaker, who appeared to be business-manager, and duly afraid of being swindled—fervid in fair speech, and correspondingly suspicious. "His wife mus' be a mons'ous hearty 'ooman!"
"He knowed she were goin' to resperse 'em to her village fren's too, of course. Which we all know dere ain't no place where you carn't" (Betty was from Cumberland county, and pronounced the a broad, to the envious disgust of the Rockbridge darkies) "git fruit like you carn't git it in the country. It is always five miles off, an' de han's is busy, or de creek is riz an' you carn't cross it."
"Come now, town-nigger, we don't want none o' yo' slack-jaw; an' ain't gwine take it, nudder!"
"Mos' incertny not," sang out a high-pitched female voice from some unseen point.
"Comin' here wid yo' half-white talk an' half-nigger!"
"But who'll git up de fus' larf?" inquired the metropolitan, suavely waiving personal discussion.
"Yo' git de 'millions, an' de laf's boun' ter foller. Don't be skeered 'bout de laf."
And his veracity proved unimpeachable, for as the melons were distributed the air became vocal with rude wit and noisy laughter, and the deep ravine gave back loud "yah-yahs" which sounded truly demoniac in the darkness, and were no doubt the reproachful, sneering laughter of the late lamented, whose obsequies were for the second time abbreviated—the resentful, mocking laughter of him who was "dead and gone."
But the negro, as said before, has one advantage over his impecunious white brother—a genius for theft. The white man may not have, as a general thing, sterner principle or a softer conscience, but it cannot be said, except in isolated cases, that he has a passion for stealing. The Chinaman is regarded by severe moralists as somewhat lax in the matter of honesty, and indeed, to be candid, he has been accused of cultivating theft as one of the fine arts; but even he has the grace to be, or to affect to be, ashamed of it, and indignantly resentful at being suspected of the immorality. The negro, on the other hand, is only terribly afraid of being punished, and on being forgiven feels immediately purified and free from sin. He has, in fact, no moral principle, and his code of honesty is comprised in a conversation I overheard this winter. Our youngest child seemed to have a vague, indefinite fear of rogues, and a very imperfect idea of what a rogue might be, and was always asking questions on the subject. One morning, while his nurse was dressing him, I heard him inquire, "How big is a rogue, Betty? Can he hear a mile?"
Before she could reply, his brother, very little older, rose to explain: "Why, Bob, you've seen a many a rogue. A rogue is thes' a man. Papa an' Uncle Bob looks ezactly like other rogues."
"Is papa an' Unker Bob rogues?" asked the youngest with innocent wonder.
"No, chile—dat dey ain't!" said Betty as she filled his eyes with soap. "Yo' papa an' yo' uncle Borb is jes' as ornes' as anybody, 'cos rogues is folks what steals an' gits cotch!"
Jennie Woodville.
THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH OF THE BARONESS CONTALETTO.
IN one of the most salubrious sections of Alaska there exists—or did exist in December, 1876—a society named "The Irreparables." It was composed of women only. For this there were several reasons. The subjects discussed were not supposed to interest men, but this might have been remedied had not the men, already in a minority in the village, absolutely refused to have anything to do with a society in which they were sure to be voted down without any very promising power of appeal. It was at one time suggested that they could become associate members, but the notary, upon examining their prospective position in the club, declared that their taxes would be so many and their rights so few that it was an offer not to be considered. So the matter was dropped, and an "Irreparable" was always a creature of the gentler sex.
The most important event in the year to this society was its annual meeting and festive celebration in December. Upon this occasion the members reviewed their accounts, perhaps voted in a new member, acted upon delinquents, and, in a word, settled up the business of the year. The festivities sometimes took the shape of a mothers' meeting, a quilting-party or a cozy little tea. In 1876 they were, however, affected by the excitement that prevailed throughout the whole United States, and which fairly reached them in December. Alaska, it was true, was not one of the thirteen colonies, but neither was Ohio nor Colorado. It was much larger than Rhode Island or Delaware. It had great possibilities, and it had cost money, which was more than could be said of the original thirteen, leaving out Pennsylvania, which even then could not be counted as a very expensive investment on the part of Mr. Penn. These patriotic reasons fired the hearts of the "Irreparables," and they determined that Alaska should celebrate the Centennial of their country, and that the celebration should be theirs.
Then the question arose of what nature this celebration should be. An Exposition was clearly out of the question, and even a school-fair was voted troublesome. Some of the younger members favored a dance, but this was objected to, because of the absurdity of a roomful of women waltzing and treading the light, fantastic German by themselves. It would seem, said the Baroness Contaletto, like a burlesque of merriment; and so the dance fell through. A service of song, a tea-drum, a cream-cornet, and a pound-party met the same fate; and finally all minds gently but firmly centred upon a dinner-party; and so it was a dinner with courses.
Naturally enough, it was not at first easy to arrange, but the admirable spirit of organization pervading the society soon brought everything into shape. There was a committee upon the bill of fare, upon the toasts, upon invitations, upon the room and upon the general arrangements. It was true that the only room in the village that was suitable was the little hall back of the tavern, and the invitations were verbally given at the meeting when the matter was decided upon; but as one never knows what emergencies may arise, it is always well to have a committee ready to act.
The chairwoman of most of the committees was the Baroness Contaletto. This was not because of her rank, as, in fact, she had no claim to her title either from birthright or marriage. Her claim rested upon the fine sense the village had of the fitness of things. She looked like a baroness: she always made it a point to behave like one. In the course of time they called her so, and when she added the name of Contaletto, the village acknowledged the fitness of that, and very soon the Baroness Contaletto was universally accepted, and Thisba Lenowski forgotten. The reason of her being so many chairwomen also rested on her fitness. She was a woman of ideas and of deeds. The minister's plans might come to naught, the editor's predictions be falsified, and the schoolmaster's reforms die out; but the enterprises undertaken by the baroness went through to a swift success. Her ideas were both contagious and epidemic, and she was always a known quantity in the place.
And so when she pooh-poohed the dance, laughed at the tea-drum and shivered at the idea of the cream-cornet, declaring for the dinner, the matter was settled, and each of the younger members promptly decided who she would ask to escort her and deliberated as to what she should wear.
Then the baroness arose. She glanced around. She read the thoughts of the members. She looked at two women. One was the sister of the county clerk: she was a woman of the most appreciative character, the clearest sense, and—she was the faithful echo of the baroness. The second was a pretty girl. She represented the other pretty girls. Then the baroness spoke. She said it was of the first importance to do this thing decorously and in order. When men had suppers they never invited women. They wanted to have a good time, and women spoiled it. She was not in favor of an "invitation entertainment." She supposed that what they wanted was a society, an "Irreparable," dinner. Therefore, she did not propose to invite men.
"But," said the pretty girl, with a rosy color mounting to her cheeks and an ominous flash in her eyes, "when I was in New Moscow I was invited to the Hercules dinner."
"To the table?" asked the baroness.
"Well—no," replied the pretty girl.
"Did you get anything to eat?" pursued the baroness.
"Oh no," answered the victim, as if this was something preposterous—"of course I didn't. We did not expect anything. But I had a splendid seat, and I heard all the toasts and everything."
"That was very nice," answered the baroness, grimly; "but I think we can do quite as well. We will invite the gentlemen to the gallery—fortunately, there is one—we will have toasts, and we will be very entertaining."
Of course the baroness had her way. Here, at once, was an advantage in the absence of associate members. Rosy cheeks and pretty eyes now counted in the society for nothing, and when the sister of the county clerk promptly moved that no gentleman be invited to the floor, the sexton's wife seconded the motion. It was carried, and on the night appointed the "Irreparables" had their dinner, and up in the gallery sat the minister, the sheriff, the county clerk, the editor of the Snow-Drift, the head-teacher and a dozen other gentlemen, all in strict evening—if still Alaskian—toilettes. At first it was funny. Then it wasn't funny. It became tiresome, and the sheriff went away. His boots creaked, the ladies looked up, and then not a married man but smiled delightedly and settled himself in his seat.
They paid much attention to the wine. It had been bought in New Moscow of the Hercules Club, and was of course all right. Yet it was over the wine that the county clerk grew restless. It was not that he wished for it particularly, but when the "Irreparables" drank champagne with their soup, sauterne with the meat, ate their nuts and made their toasts with sherry, his patience was put to a severe test. It was something to see that most of the glasses went away almost untasted, but the head-teacher found it best to keep a steady eye upon him and save him from doing more than mutter his opinions.
But when the toasts came the gallery visibly brightened up. The "Irreparables" toasted the country and its resources, the United States, Mrs. Seward, the Centennial, Mrs. Grant, and the widow the chief alderman was to marry. They drank to Queen Victoria, and, with a remembrance of past loyalty, to the czarina. To each toast a member responded in terms fitting and witty, and when the pretty girl arose and, with a glance at the gallery, gave "The gentlemen—God bless them!" the baroness stood up and made reply. She thanked the company in the name of the gentlemen. She spoke of them in high and eloquent terms. She alluded to their usefulness, their courage, their good looks. She did them full justice as resources in times of trouble, of war and of midnight burglaries.
The county clerk ran his fingers through his hair, the color came into the cheeks of the clergyman, and a subdued murmur as of pleasure ran through the little group in the gallery.
Then the baroness continued. She said she was not a woman-suffragist—at least she wasn't sure that she was. She had, she thanked her stars, her own opinion upon most matters, but while she had no positive objection to right-minded women having any real or fancied wrongs redressed, and in their own way, she had not yet thought clearly enough upon the subject to be sure that the ballot was the remedy. She knew there was a great deal of nonsense talked about the moral influence women would exert in politics: perhaps they would, but to her it seemed very much like watering potato-blossoms to get rid of the worms at the root.
Here the county clerk half rose, but the head-teacher held him with his disciplining eye, and he sat down again.
What was needed, said the baroness, was not mending, regenerating, giving freedom or doing justice. These things were all very good, but more was necessary. "There is no remedy," she said with rising inflections and with emphasis—"no remedy but a total change. What we want is not an extension of the suffrage, but a limitation!"
She wished it, however, distinctly understood that she in no way meant to affirm that woman was man's superior: she did not think so. In his own place man could not be surpassed. The sciences, the arts, the industrial pursuits, religion, civilization, all owed a deep debt to man, and it could not be ignored. She was the last person in the world to wish to ignore it. Properly governed, disciplined and educated, his development might outrun hope, defy prophecy. Out of his place he was a comet without an orbit. Drawn hither and thither by sinister stars, he was an eccentricity beyond calculation and full of harm. For this reason the interests of humanity demanded that the place of man in the conduct of affairs should be well defined and limited. It was well to look this matter in the face.
"Now," proceeded the baroness, "I leave it to any class of men, to any one man, to declare whether the world is, or ever has been, well governed. Is there any age, any country upon record, where justice has reigned, where the interests of every class have been consulted, and where the people have lived together in mutual esteem, in unity and in prosperity? If we look through the world to-day, we find but one country that is governed in anything like a satisfactory manner. It is loved by some classes of its people, and admired by very many foreigners. When we reflect that it is governed by a queen, and that history tells us that its most prosperous period in the past was under Queen Elizabeth, it is certainly safe to assume—No, no, my friends," she said, hastily, "do not applaud. That is not my point. It is possible that women may govern better than men, but that is yet to be tested. This illustration proves but one thing—that a country is better for not being governed by a man."
Her point was this: she did not appear as an advocate of suffrage for women, but as an earnest petitioner against its being any longer held by men. The one thing a man could not do was—to govern! This was no assertion. It was a fact proved by all history. Since the beginning of the world men had had the governing power in their hands, and what a mess they had always made of it! There had never been a decent government. Oppression, rebellion, anarchy, war, bloodshed, slavery and tyranny,—this was their record.
If women could do anything better, she was in favor of giving them the opportunity of proving it, but it was not her purpose to propose the after-treatment. She was not a physician in charge, but the surgeon for the moment.
She had made suggestions: she freely confessed it. She had, for instance, proposed to their talented townsman, the editor of the Snow-Drift, a series of articles upon the existing Presidential contest. As far as she could learn, there was a great lack of unanimity regarding the vote, and it was not clear to the Hayes party that Tilden was elected. Now, she had suggested that there were certain classes concerned but not consulted in the election, and to them she proposed leaving the decision. The legal voters had blundered horribly in some way, and she would have been in favor of allowing the Indians, the Chinese, the convicts, the idiots and the women to decide the matter. It could not be made worse, and it might be made better.
But leaving all these questions of a past hour, she would put the axe where George Washington did not put it—at the root of the tree—near enough also, she would remark, to leave no stump, and so at once place politics upon a new basis by taking the governing power away from the gentlemen, God bless them!
Louise Stockton.
MUSIC IN AMERICA
ENGLAND and America have long been classed among the unmusical countries of the world, and for good reasons. Their history so far records the names of no composers of a high rank; and although in both countries there are plenty of amateurs and minor musicians who fully appreciate the best there is in the art, yet the people as a whole are not influenced by it in the same way as the Germans and the Italians, to whose hungry souls music is as necessary as is oxygen to their lungs. If we adopt the good old-fashioned classification of instrumental and vocal pieces into "music for the feet," or dance music, "music for the ear," or drawing-room music, "and music for the head and heart," or classical music, we are forced to admit that so far only the first of these classes has found general favor with our masses. Waltzes, quick-steps, galops, quadrilles, are the daily food of our people, and there are thousands of pianos scattered throughout the country which are never used for any other purpose than to play this dance music, which occupies about the same place in relation to the higher forms of music as dancing on the stage does to artistic acting. Next comes the somewhat more elevated branch of drawing-room or salon music, which in the cities and towns is very largely cultivated. It is typified by the popular "Maiden's Prayer," and also includes the more sensational of the French and Italian opera melodies with all their vocal pyrotechnics, as well as the pianoforte fantasias on these same melodies—in short, all music written with a view to giving the performer an opportunity of displaying facility of execution rather than genuine feeling.
It is only in our centres of culture, the largest of our cities, that sufficient interest is taken in the highest products of musical genius to call into life and to support respectable orchestras and choruses; and even in these centres of culture there is no excess of devotion, as is perhaps best shown by the great rarity of amateur string quartettes, those most intellectual and most enjoyable of all musical clubs, whose sphere is classical chamber music, the direct opposite in most respects of the drawing-room music just spoken of. How different all this is from the state of affairs in Germany, where every town of ten thousand inhabitants has its well-managed opera-house and its various kinds of musical clubs for public and private amusement! The difference may best be realized by reading Wagner's admirable little essay, Ueber Deutsches Musikwesen, republished in the first volume of his collected works.
Perhaps there is no better way of arriving at a just estimate of the present state of general musical culture in this country than by looking at what may be called the creative department, and examining the vocal and instrumental sheet-music of native composers continually issued in such large quantities by our publishers. Were we to follow an old maxim, that the best way of judging the inner life of a nation is to listen to its music, and accordingly judge of the sentiments and emotions of Americans by their sheet-music, we should arrive at very discouraging results. The characteristics of our sheet-music, briefly summed up, are: (1) trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm mechanical and commonplace, and the cadences unchanging as the laws of Nature; (3) insipid, sensational titles; (4) words usually so silly that a respectable country newspaper would refuse to print them in its columns—true to the French bon-mot, that what is too stupid to be spoken or read must be sung.
This may seem too sweeping a condemnation, but it is not. There are some honorable exceptions of course, but only just enough of them to attract notice by the contrast, and thus to prove the rule. If an aspiring young composer wishes to appear in print, the point to which he must direct his attention is to secure, not a good original melody or a piquant accompaniment, but a "catching" title, like "Timber-Thief Galop," "Silver Bill Polka," or "Sitting Bull March." If his choice in this respect does not please the publisher, his manuscript may yet escape the paper-basket if its title-page happens to be embellished with a grotesque cartoon or a sentimental picture of a couple of lovers or cats who have met by moonlight alone. From these external and all-essential attributes an experienced agent can form an accurate estimate of how large the sale of a new piece will be; and he will tell you that so little does the excellence of the music contribute to its success that in general the sale of compositions in this country stands in inverse ratio to their merits.
The sheet-music nuisance seems to be a phenomenon peculiar to this country; for, although France, England, Italy, and even Germany, annually produce much music which is not worth the printer's ink, yet in comparison with ours it might almost be called classical. And the melancholy thing about it is, that specimens of these flimsy productions may be seen lying about freely on the pianos of people who would blush at the mere thought of having books of the same intellectual and æsthetic level lying on their parlor-tables for general inspection and for the entertainment of guests. For, while the corrupting influence of an impure story or a bad picture has long since been recognized, it still seems to be imagined by many educated people that music being the "divine art" any form of it must of course be desirable, and better than nothing at all. This is the form of Philistinism which before all others must be combated ere we can hope to materially purify our musical atmosphere. The error naturally arose from the great amount of silly talk about music, which is usually represented as being incapable of lending itself to the expression of any but the noblest sentiments and emotions. Quite the contrary. If good music has all those wonderful powers which have been ascribed to it from time immemorial, it follows necessarily that bad music must exert equal powers in an opposite direction. In fact, bad music is even a more demoralizing agent than, for instance, a miserable newspaper. The latter is once hastily read through and then thrown away, while a poor musical composition is apt to be preserved in the parlor—perhaps, neatly bound with some others of like value, is carefully studied, or even memorized, and repeatedly sung at evening parties; and in this way it cannot but slowly vitiate the taste of performer and hearer alike, and make them deaf to the beauties of better things.
If we turn from this aspect of music in America to our concert-halls, the prospect is much brighter. In this department we have achieved more than in any other, and no one is now obliged to go abroad in order to hear a good concert, as he is if he wishes to enjoy a respectable operatic performance. How much of this is due to the energy of one man, Mr. Theodore Thomas, everybody knows, and it is not too much to say that the "new departure" he is about to make may be expected to mark an epoch in the history of American music. Cincinnati will henceforth claim the position of musical metropolis, and whether its pre-eminence be conceded or a vigorous rivalry maintained, the whole country must feel the good effect of that generous ambition which has rescued a noble enterprise from an uncertain and fluctuating condition, and offered it a secure haven.
Americans have already good reasons for being proud of their concerts, for except in Berlin there are perhaps no audiences in Europe which have the advantage of us in this respect. This can be seen by comparing our programmes with those offered in continental cities, as recorded every week in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, published at Leipsic. I have repeatedly seen paragraphs in leading German papers calling attention to Mr. Thomas's programmes, and hinting that their own conductors might learn something from them. What is particularly noticeable about them is their cosmopolitanism, and this has contributed much to their success. It has been said, however, by some that Thomas's sole aim seems to be to offer as many novelties as possible, and that he disregards artistic perspective in the arrangement of his programmes. He has indeed never followed the illiberal principle that it is bad taste to perform the works of living masters—a principle which has done much to bring to the brink of ruin a certain association in Boston—but he has endeavored to do justice to all the composers from Bach to Berlioz and Wagner. If Mr. Thomas makes an effort to introduce to his audience a new symphony by Brahms or a new symphonic poem by Saint Säens immediately after its issue from the press, we certainly ought to be very grateful to him for his enterprise. When a prominent author writes a new book everybody is eager to get sight of it as soon as possible, and no one has any fault to find with this curiosity. But when a similar eagerness is manifested to hear a new symphony, the conservatives at once cry out, "For shame! Would you neglect the old masters for the sake of pieces which the wear and tear of time have not yet proved to possess permanent value?" The Messrs. Conservatives evidently do not perceive the ludicrous aspect of their position. If their influence were not fortunately losing instead of gaining in strength, we might soon look for the extinction of art through the infanticide of genius. Mr. Thomas is not a conservative, and, thanks to this fact, we are often enabled to hear a new composition even before it has been performed in all the German capitals.
Of the condition of our operatic affairs it is impossible to speak in the same terms of self-congratulation as of our concerts, and will remain impossible as long as our opera troupes differ in no essential respects—except in being less sure of their parts—from travelling bands of negro minstrels. An orchestra may with impunity travel from one city to another: it always remains the same, and only needs a good hall to appear to advantage. But an operatic performance is such a complicated affair that excellence can only be attained after years of constant practice under the same conditions and with the same materials, and without constant changes in the chorus, orchestra and stage surroundings. European experience seems to show that without government assistance good dramatic and operatic performances are not possible. In France and Germany, where such assistance is given, the theatres are good: in England and America, where none is given, they are bad. Perhaps in course of time our national or city governments will come to recognize and support the theatre as an educational institution, or at least as a good means of suppressing intemperance and other vices by supplying a harmless mode of amusement. There is little prospect, however, that this will happen soon. It is more likely that some of our rich men will at last come to see the folly of founding so many new colleges, and devote their money to other uses. Had Mr. Samuel Wood left his money for the establishment of a permanent first-class opera instead of a conservatory, he would have done a wiser thing. The importance of a good opera-house as an institution for promoting musical culture is not yet generally understood—naturally enough, considering the wretched performances we have so far been obliged to endure. The opera has one great advantage over concerts: it is more attractive to the uninitiated. It appeals to the eye as well as the ear. The scenic splendors will attract many unmusical and semi-musical people who shun the purely intellectual atmosphere of a classical concert as a great bore; and while they gaze at the wonders of the scenery they unconsciously drink in the music, so that in course of time they learn to appreciate that for its own sake. When Lohengrin was first performed in the German cities the masses attended it chiefly to see the new and brilliant scenic effects. They found the music stupid, devoid of melody and form, and bristling with "algebraic" harmonies. But they went so often to see the swan drawing the mysterious knight through the waters of the Rhine that they finally learned that the opera is a rich storehouse of the most exquisite melody, that a wonderful unity of forms pervades the whole, and that the algebraic harmonies serve to express depths of emotion hitherto unknown. In the same way the Vienna people have been lately crowding the theatre to see the Rhine-daughters in their long blue robes swimming about under the surface of the river, to see the fight with the dragon, the march of the gods over the rainbow, the ride of the walkyries on their wild steeds, the burning Walhalla, etc., and have gradually discovered that their critics at Bayreuth again hoaxed them when they wrote that the music of the Trilogy was "atomic," that it was devoid of melody, and that the harmony was in defiance of all the laws of euphony.
These illustrations show the value of good scenery. Independently of its artistic value, it is a legitimate bait for enticing people to a place where they are obliged to hear good music. Good scenery, however, has never been the strong point of our opera troupes. They never had more than one strong point. Formerly, some of the great prime donne used to pay us an occasional visit, but now even they have learned to avoid us, because we are no longer willing to pay five dollars for an evening's amusement. London, Paris and St. Petersburg are at present the head-quarters of the costly "stars." Nor is this fact to be regretted. The decline of the star system is rather to be greeted as the dawn of a better era. It has always been the curse of the opera and the greatest obstacle to improvement. There was a time when the prima donna was so omnipotent that even the composers were her slaves, being frequently obliged to alter passages to suit the taste of the stage goddess; and there are instances on record of whole operas having been composed in vain because she did not happen to be pleased with them, and refused to sing. This evil period we have happily out-grown, but an equally great nuisance remains. The exorbitant prices still demanded by the "stars" are out of all proportion to their deserts, and show that even if the composers are their slaves no longer, the spectators and managers still are so. In Paris and elsewhere it is often found impossible to do justice to the secondary stage appointments because the salaries of the soprano and the tenor swallow the whole income. The Germans, on the other hand, are too artistic and rational to endure such an imposition. To them the one-star-and-ten-satellites system seems an abomination, and doubtless Emperor William had the sympathies and approval of all his subjects when he refused to engage Patti at a price that would have proved disastrous to the high aims of the imperial opera, which are to preserve an evenly-balanced and uniform excellence of all the parts of a performance. There are signs that even England is outgrowing the star system. Carl Rosa has adopted the German system of dispensing with "phenomenal" singers, putting the minor rôles into good hands, and keeping a well-trained chorus and orchestra; and his success, as everybody knows, has been enormous. Now let some competent manager in this country follow his example: let him show that he does not merely aim at getting the people's money, but that he has also the ambition of honestly interpreting the works of the masters and developing a healthy taste for good dramatic music and acting, and there can be little doubt that instead of increasing the number of failures now recorded, the enterprise would prove a success, and show, as Carl Rosa's has done, that in this way opera can be made to pay even without government assistance.
Although our rulers have not yet recognized the theatre as a possible source of culture, they have done something which to the country at large is of even greater importance than this would be. They have been gradually introducing vocal music as a regular branch of study in our public schools. In this matter we seem to have anticipated England, for while singing was introduced in the schools of Boston more than forty, and in Baltimore more than thirty, years ago, in the British House of Commons only twenty-five years ago, when a member proposed that singing should be taught in all schools, as in Germany, "the suggestion was received with ridicule, and was deemed deserving of no other response than a loud laugh." But there has also been, and still is, some opposition to its general introduction in this country. Only a few months ago the St. Louis press urged its removal from the schools on the ground that it is one of the "ornamental" studies, and that more time is in that city, for instance, devoted to it than to the practical subjects of geography and arithmetic. This last objection has not much force. All that is really practical and generally useful in geography and arithmetic can be learned in a few years, whereas to make progress in the difficult art of music it is necessary to begin early and continue for many years. The true answer to such an objection is, that there is no need of neglecting either of these branches. There is time enough for all of them if only a proper method of instruction be pursued. Still more untenable is the idea that music is merely an ornamental study and of no practical value. This idea rests on the mistaken theory of education which holds that only the intellect needs training. If our sole aim is to get something to eat and to drink, and a house to shelter us from the weather, then we need only cultivate the intellect so that we may be able to compete with others. But if we care for beautiful homes, if we wish to enjoy life in a higher sense than that in which a savage enjoys it, and to make ourselves and others happy, then the training of the emotions through music is as important as the training of the intellect in a practical and not an "ornamental" sense.
Fortunately, none of the objections hitherto urged against singing in public schools have been able to effect any change for the worse. Vocal music is now taught in the common schools of nearly every city and large town in New England and the Northern and Western States. In Boston—which has always been noted for its excellence in this department—thanks to the intelligent labors of Mr. Lowell Mason and Mr. Julius Eichberg, it is now possible, on occasion, to raise a chorus of five thousand well-trained juvenile voices. And it is gratifying to observe with what unanimity the good influence of public-school singing is attested by the commissioners of all those States which have given it a fair trial. The grounds on which it is usually commended are that it puts life and variety into the dull routine of studies—that it promotes order and discipline, stimulates the social feelings, electrifies the wearied nervous system, conduces to health by the regular and vigorous exercise of the lungs, trains the moral sentiments by refining the æsthetic emotions, and tends to improve the congregational singing in our churches. To quote the language of the Commissioner of Education (Report for 1873): "Experience proves that as music is perfected and used in the daily routine of school duties, just in that proportion are the deportment and general appearance of the schools improved." Indeed, it is difficult to calculate all the good results that in course of time must follow from general musical instruction in our schools. It is certainly the only effective method of removing in a few generations the reproach that we are not a musical people. In Germany—which perhaps has done more for music than all other countries combined—the foundation for musical culture is laid in the schools by the singing of folk-songs (Volkslieder) and chorals in three-or four-part harmony. And those who have read the history of music know that these same folk-songs and chorals were the first musical fruits grown on German soil: they were the fruits on which in past centuries the people lived and formed their taste. It is evident, therefore, that in now teaching these folk-songs and chorals to their children the Germans are guided by that important law of evolution which shows that the development of the child partly does, and partly should be made to, conform to the development of the race, step by step.
There is no reason why we should not follow this same principle. Of course it will not be necessary to confine ourselves to German folk-songs, although these are on the whole the best. We are a mixed people, compounded of all nationalities, and hence the folk-songs of Italy, France, Scotland, Russia and various other countries should all be acclimated in our schools. There is something peculiarly healthy and fresh about folk-songs which one only finds again in the very highest efforts of individual creative genius. They are like flowers that have grown up in virgin forests, nurtured by rain and sunshine, fanned by vigorous breezes and shielded from all the hot-house influences of a morbid civilization. So rich and spontaneous are many of these melodies that they can be thoroughly enjoyed even when sung without harmony or accompaniment, while for advanced classes it is easy to write second and third vocal parts, thus adding to their interest and value.
While early familiarity with the best of these songs would have a good effect in refining the popular sense of melody, the appreciation of what came last and is highest in music—of harmonic progressions—could best be taught by a similar familiarity with the German four-part chorals. They are the very embodiment of vigorous, soul-stirring harmony, the basis of sacred, as the Volkslied is of secular, music. "Each of our churches," says Thibaut, the author of the celebrated little book on Purity in Musical Art, "had a period of the highest enthusiasm, which will never return, and each of them has at this very period of the most ardent religious zeal done its utmost for the development of its song." The German choral is the result of the intense devotional feelings which existed among the early Protestant congregations, and it is evident that a wholesome religious spirit could with it be introduced in our schools in a manner which could be objectionable to no denomination. In course of time these chorals might then be transferred to our churches, where they might well take the place of the easier but very eccentric melodies and incorrect harmonies now too often heard there.
Henry T. Finck.