For Ever.
Those we love truly never die,
Though year by year the sad memorial-wreath—
A ring and flowers, types of life and death—
Are laid upon their graves.
For death the pure life saves,
And life all pure is love, and love can reach
From heaven to earth, and nobler lessons teach,
Than those by mortals read.
Well blest is he who has a dear one dead:
A friend he has whose face will never change,
A dear communion that will not grow strange:
The anchor of a love is death.
The blessed sweetness of a loving breath
Will reach our cheek all fresh through fourscore years:
For her who died long since, ah! waste not tears—
She's thine unto the end.
Thank God for one dead friend,
Whose mother-face no miles of road or sea
Or earthly bonds can hold apart from me—
First friend in life and death.
Visit To An Artist's Studio.
I do not know if, outside his own small circle of patrons and acquaintances, any one has heard of the artist Van Muyden. Yet hidden talent is none the less a divine gift because few know it; it gives a more pathetic interest to a life to know that it is a life harassed with care, vexed by non-appreciation, hampered with poverty. Perhaps Van Muyden is only obscure because he would not lower his art to suit the dealers' terms or the public taste. When I visited his studio, he was settled in a small house in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. His own appearance was striking: the supple form, not very tall, but very spare; the large eyes that seemed to dart through you and search your soul, the high forehead, wrinkled and bald, told of a man with an intellect higher than that of his fellow-men, an ideal enthroned beyond the region of which they know the bearings, and of the cares with which they can sympathize. He was a man past the prime of life, eager and enthusiastic—eccentric, perhaps, as the world's estimate goes; but who is not?—I mean amongst those whose characteristics are worth studying at all. He wore over his vest and trowsers an old brown dressing-gown, suggestive of the appearance one is used to connect with mediæval scholars and seers. His forte is not landscape-painting, and, indeed, he seemed lost at Geneva, despite the southern beauty of its environs, for Van Muyden's predilections were evidently for the representation of the human kind. But then, if it was man that he loved to copy, it was not broad-cloth man, sleek, respectable, decorous, well-off, but man as you find him in Italy or Spain—picturesque as his scanty surroundings; an unconscious artist, a born model; man imbued with the spirit of the sun-god; man carolling and trilling without effort, believing himself born to sing like the birds; man in himself a study, a picture, a statue, a marvel.
Van Muyden explained his theories very freely, and they were well worth listening to.
“In the north, you see,” he said, “an artist is forced, if he wishes to be truthful, to copy a thousand pitiful details of upholstery. Such pictures are called genre; and this realistic, mathematical accuracy, utterly destructive of the picturesque, is lauded to the skies; but, good God! could not a Chinese do as well with his wonderful imitative faculty, altogether apart from the feeling of art? The North makes up for the picturesque by the comfortable; what a compensation for the artist! But modern art has more [pg 274] to contend with than vitiated taste or the loss of that free and natural life which in simpler times was more conducive to artistic inspiration; we have to struggle on without a school or a standard of taste. We no longer have those centres where the traditions of art were religiously kept; those high-priests who gathered round them numerous and docile disciples, as of old the Athenian philosophers in the groves of Academe. Even in Italy, in Rome itself, no such centre can be found. A young artist has to make his own solitary way, pursue his ideal alone, keep up his enthusiasm by his own unaided exertions, and probably find neither patron nor master to care for his works or guide his attempts.”
The artist was surely right; for the great schools of painting were to art what the religious orders are to the church—centres towards which a vague vocation may be directed and find its true mission, with brethren to share its enthusiasm and superiors to guide its aspirations. Most of his pictures were Italian scenes, some domestic, but mostly treating of the monastic life. The cool cloister, with its ilex or orange-trees seen cornerwise through the railings; the old portico, with a monk seated in meditation on the fragment of a sculptured pillar: the noon-day siesta; the begging friar coming home with his sack of food; the preacher starting meekly, staff in hand, for the distant station where he is to preach a Lent; the novice arranging the altar; the monk digging his own grave in the sunny cloister, or washing the altar-plate in the sparkling fountain, etc. etc.—such were chiefly the subjects chosen. Why? He was not a Catholic, this artist; but it seems to have come to him intuitively that there is more room for artistic expression and artistic liberty in things pertaining to the old church. His own studio was as perfect a picture as any he could have painted; a treasure-house of antiquities carelessly displayed. It was lighted by two immense windows, one of which was shaded by a sort of slanting tester, throwing the light on the easel in the middle of the room. Between these windows stood a nondescript piece of furniture in carved oak, very black and old—a species of secrétaire, with an “extension” holding a small washing-bowl, surmounted by a dolphin's head, which was crowned for the nonce with a scarlet berrétta. Large jars of old porcelain were placed here and there, either on the ground or on substantial étagères, and two corners of the room were filled with high chests equally carved, on whose capacious tops rested a medley of distaffs, horns, helmets, old swords, a spinning-wheel, and a confused mass of tattered garments or drapery, dingy and time-stained, crimson cloaks, blue tunics, purple veils, etc. An array of pipes, hooked into the wall for security, stood on the high mantel-piece, together with one of those common brass kitchen lamps in use at Rome, with four projections enclosing wicks, and whose shape has never been altered since the days when Nero rode in the arena and the Christians went calmly to the stake. On the unoccupied spaces on the wall hung the artist's pictures, some few representing touching family scenes (all Italian) strewed among the monastic subjects. Right in the centre of the ceiling hung a movable apparatus, in which was placed a lamp—modern, alas! This came down quite close to the easel, and gave all the light required [pg 275] for night-work. A carved table with curiously-twisted legs, and two high-backed mediæval arm-chairs covered with tapestry, completed the furniture, besides a green baize stage for the models. This reminded me of the palco used for preaching in Italian churches, even when there is a proper pulpit; some of my readers may remember these miniature stages, raised about five feet from the floor, and on which the excited orator can promenade like a lion in his cage while hurling his burning periods at his awe-stricken listeners. Van Muyden has a wife and nine children, which fact we ascertained through the reply to a question prompted by the enormous quantity of under-linen hung out to dry on the balusters outside the studio. We did not see Mme. Van Muyden, and were thankful we did not; for such a reckless display of household secrets must argue a woman whose appearance would frighten romance out of the veriest sentimentalist that ever lived. So we speculated in silence on this domestic guardian of the artist's peace—an excellent and worthy woman, no doubt, a capital house-keeper, a careful mother, a faithful wife, but scarcely a help-mate, a companion, a Beatrice, to her husband. How few men of sensitive nature, high-strung character, aspiring organization, have fit wives! Why is it that they generally take a fancy to peculiarly unsuitable women? Is it that they are so soft-hearted that they cannot resist the attraction of the first pretty face they see, or so rapt above the reach of common interests that they form, as it were inevitably, an incongruous union, and only wake up to find themselves irretrievably tied to a showy slattern, or a plodding, unappreciative housewife? What perverse fairy casts her spell on the poor artist's marriage-day, and makes of the chime of his wedding-bells the knell of his possible fame?
Poverty is the safest ladye-love for an artist, as one of Dante's friends was always telling him. Artists and scholars are the Francis-of-Assisiums of the intellectual world, and the same bride as that spiritually wooed by the heroic voluntary beggar, is the most fitting companion for them. With her, at least, they can enjoy the perfect freedom from care which alone makes want supportable; they can throw around their destitution that halo of romance which the prosaic details of a household invariably strangle out of existence. But in the early choice of a wife more hopes go down, more aspirations are smothered, than those whose aim is worldly success and the favor of the great. The ideal is the victim par excellence; for the struggling artist, tied by his own hasty imprudence to a woman of inferior mould, soon feels the spark of genius die within him; the incentive to “do and dare” has dwindled down to the necessity of “earning and eating.” A woman with uncomprehensive soul peevishly reminds him at every moment of the world of matter, without even offering him the compensation of a blind and admiring worship of his talents in his own peculiar sphere; in short, he is a living example of the adage, “A man that's married is a man that's marred.”
Far be it from me to bring this reproach on any particular individual; but such was the train of thought naturally induced by the unsightly array of house-linen hung like delusive flags of truce on the balusters of the artist's home. Early marriage is undoubtedly [pg 276] best for the generality of men in the world, but it is intellectual ruin to artists. Let us wish them the rare fortune of a wife that will be a real helpmate to their higher and better selves, a staff to lean on up the thorny road to Parnassus, and then recommend early marriage; but unless such exceptions be found, let them beware of the fate typified by the prosaic decoration of Van Muyden's abode at Geneva.