From Memory's Shrine: The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva

by Carmen Sylva

If ever a face on this earth may be said to have been irradiated and illumined by the light of genuine kindliness—of the pure goodness of heart that transcends all other human qualities—it was the countenance of our beloved friend, Karl Sohn, the Düsseldorf artist. His features were not regular, but were refined and spiritualised by the beauty of the soul that shone through, the gentleness of his physiognomy being only enhanced by the commanding character of the lofty, well-chiselled brow, shaded as this was by soft masses of thick fair hair. He was tall of stature, well proportioned and of dignified bearing, his step light and easy, in spite of his great height, and with something almost willowy in his gait; every movement was impregnated with grace and harmony. There was a peculiar charm in his conversation, and this may probably have been in great measure due to the soft deep tones of his finely modulated voice, as clear and caressing as the sound of a silver bell, wrapt in velvet. But much of the fascination doubtless lay in the graceful and appropriate gestures with which he accompanied his words, and which lent singular force to his graphic descriptions. Thus, in expatiating on the beauties of some landscape, words and action seemed to go together to call it up before our eyes, one broad sweep of his well-shaped hand making the undulating line of the distant mountain-range visible to everyone.

What a pleasure it was to listen to that mellow voice, and to the low laugh with which he sometimes interrupted his own stories. Sohn was one of those exceptional, happily constituted beings, themselves so perfectly harmonious, that their presence seems to diffuse an atmosphere of peace and contentment, into which as each one enters he feels on better terms with himself and others. The world was full of beauty for him, as it is for few of us, and the joy he felt in every aspect of the beautiful—in Nature, in children, in the human form divine, and in pleasant companionship—was, like the whole nature of the man, at once ingenuous and profound. He had laid out for himself a little garden round his house in Düsseldorf, with so much skill, that the small space really looked like a miniature park. The effect was charming; but the proprietor seemed almost to find it necessary to apologise for such a display of luxury, saying deprecatingly,—“The beautiful is a necessary condition of existence to us poor artists! So indispensable is it to us, that we would willingly make every other sacrifice, just to be able to surround ourselves with things of beauty!”

It was through his pupil, my great-uncle Charles, that we first became acquainted with Sohn. My uncle, who had been a musical dilettante for the first fifty years of his life, attaining I believe a certain proficiency on the French horn, had recently turned his attention to painting, in which art he was still a mere tyro at the time of my parents’ marriage. At first he was always sending for Sohn, to ask his criticism and advice, and by sheer hard work and perseverance he succeeded in the end in painting very good portraits. There was one of my mother, for which she declared she sat to him no less than seventy-five times. To beguile the tedium of those long sittings, she learned by heart the parts she was going to play in private theatricals, repeating the lines aloud without fear of disturbing the artist, who was quite absorbed in his work, and very hard of hearing into the bargain. But in the one play occurred a phrase so singularly appropriate, that she could not resist raising her voice for it to reach the ears of the deaf old man, who peeped out astonished from behind his easel and shook his finger at her, as she exclaimed:—“Dear Uncle! must I then really be bored to death!” And her subsequent assurance that this was only in her part only half mollified him. In spite of the long sittings, the portrait was not a success; it however brought Sohn to our house, and two admirable pictures of my mother by him represent her in all her youthful bloom at that period. The one is in a red velvet dress, her face framed in a mass of fair curls; the other in her riding-habit, just as he had seen her jump down from her horse, flushed with the exercise of a long ride.

These were the first two pictures Sohn painted in our family, but he was henceforth every year a welcome visitor, often making a stay of many weeks among us, and painting more than one portrait of each member of the family. He was inspired to his finest work, one of his many portraits of my mother—by seeing her in the ecstatic trance. So deeply had this impressed him, that it was almost under similar conditions that he worked, altogether removed from this earthly plane, blind and deaf to all that went on around him, and entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the radiant, transfigured countenance of his model, and in the feverish effort to transfer to his canvas some faint reflection of the wondrous radiance diffused over her whole person. In his despair of obtaining this effect from the ordinary resources of his palette, he was forever seeking some new means, devising some new combination of colour, he would fain have dipped his brush in pure light, have steeped the whole picture in unclouded sunshine! Something of this has been felt by all those who have striven, with like fidelity and with the same gross materials, to copy the dazzling hues even of some simple flower; has one but tried, with such poor pigments, with our muddy bismuths and dingy ochres, to reproduce the lily’s transparent whiteness or the rich gold of the humble buttercup, we can the better appreciate the vanity of all attempts at imitating on so feeble and limited a scale, the radiant tints and subtle, endless gradations of Nature’s colour-box, employed by the Divine Artist! We must needs perforce, for lack of the clear strong light, throw up our dim half-lights and faded colours by deeper shadows. But Sohn for this once would none of such artifice. Disdaining every expedient of contrast, he laid on the colours simply and boldly, after the manner of the Early Masters, painting with the pious enthusiasm, the sacred fire that was theirs, and borrowing something of their technical methods to impart the expression of holy rapture to the face, a diaphanous delicacy to the folded hands, to give to the kneeling figure the semblance of a martyr at the stake, a saint to whose beatific vision the gates of Heaven are flung open wide!

Sohn made a picture of my brother Wilhelm and myself, at four and five years of age, hand in hand; such a speaking likeness, that as we stood beside it holding a big wreath of flowers, when it was given to my father on his birthday, he kept looking from the painting to us, and then back again to the picture—quite puzzled for a moment, he assured us, as to which were the real children and which their portrait! Such restless beings as small children can never be very easy to paint; but Sohn succeeded wonderfully in catching the expression on each little face,—my brother’s serious and dreamy, with an almost stolid determination to keep quiet, and mine, all life and movement, with sparkling eyes and a dancing smile, that betokened anything but the requisite immobility of pose. It was an amusing contrast; Wilhelm stood firm as a rock, whilst all my efforts to keep still as I was bidden only made me tremble from head to foot with impatience, and at one sitting resulted in my fainting away after I had actually accomplished the feat of keeping in the same position for five consecutive minutes! I remember how alarmed the artist was, when I suddenly fell from my chair to the floor, in a dead faint, and how concerned he was about me, reproaching himself with the unnatural constraint imposed on my mercurial nature by the sittings. But what surprised him most of all, was to witness the means employed to bring me round; as I recovered consciousness, a sip of cold water, a little piece of black bread were given me by my mother to revive me, and Sohn, who was not then so well acquainted with the Spartan simplicity of our bringing up, felt amazed, as he afterwards told us, at the homeliness of the measures. Little princesses, he thought, were always fed on dainties, and would not condescend to eat anything less appetising than cake!

The torture those sittings were to me, I hope he never knew. He was so good and kind, and did so much to make them bearable, whiling away the time by talking to us and telling us amusing stories, or getting someone else to read an entertaining book aloud to us while he painted. But it was all no good. Outside I could see the sun shining, and hear the birds singing and the wind whistling through the trees, and I—who longed to be out there in the sunshine, singing with the birds, and running races with the wind,—I must be cooped up within four walls, in a room that instead of the fragrance of the flowers, smelt of nasty oil-colours! It was not to be borne. As well try to imprison the wild west wind, or stop the dancing mountain-stream in its course! I was just as wild and free, and my mother sometimes asked if any power on earth could be found to tame me. Had she but known! All too soon a spell would be worked, transforming the wayward child into a quiet gentle maiden, grave-eyed and serious. It was by the discipline of sorrow that the change should be wrought—in the sick-room that the lesson must be learnt; there I could sit for hours, silent and motionless, dreading lest a movement, a whisper should disturb the dear sufferer beside whose pillow I watched.

But already then, in my wildest, most reckless mood, and however my spirit might chafe at the enforced immobility of the lengthy sittings, I felt the soothing influence of the artist’s gentle voice, and the deep full tones could lull my feverish impatience. Nor did the impression wear off as time went on; echoes of that sympathetic voice live in my memory, calling up many a bygone scene—long talks as we rambled through the forest, dreams and aspirations, hopes and fears, all the joys and sorrows of those vanished days,—Sohn’s memory is inseparably associated with all of these. The portraits he painted extend over a long series of years. One of Otto was done just before the poor boy’s death—my father’s also, at a time when we knew that he had not long to live among us—my mother he depicted at all times and seasons, and under all possible circumstances, from ecstasy to the deepest mourning. He used to say, that he hoped to live long enough to make one more portrait of her with snow-white hair. But this wish remained unfulfilled, for my mother’s hair had not yet turned grey, when he was called away from us.

One autumn Sohn came to us accompanied by his friend, the great artist, Lessing. The latter, a very handsome man, like so many of the followers of Art, was extremely taciturn. He was a good sportsman, shooting his deer almost daily. Much as I dislike all sport, my admiration of the artist induced me to bring him the proverbial good luck, by meeting him as if by chance when he set out in the early morn with his gun. As I passed with a smiling though silent greeting, I thought to myself that had he but known my horror of the slaughter of innocent dumb creatures, the great painter would have been still more flattered by this attention on the part of the daughter of the house. This was after Otto’s death, and Lessing made a sketch of the grave for my mother, with the wonderful precision in rendering every detail that characterised him. Every branch of the trees overshadowing the tomb was portrayed with lifelike fidelity; Lessing’s scrupulous exactitude refusing to sanction the slightest deviation from the original. Every bough, every twig must be in its place; even in a landscape his veracity would not tolerate any suppression or addition. His realism, his close copying of Nature, was coupled with a fear of accepting any other teacher; and he had always been afraid to visit Italy, lest he should sacrifice something of his own originality to the involuntary imitation of the Old Masters.

When I grew up, Sohn wished to make a portrait of me, as he often saw me, sitting in the shadow of a tree, a straw hat on my head, in my simple morning attire. But it was unfortunately quite another picture that was wanted—in evening dress, in the drawing-room—just something that I hated, and that seemed to me so little like myself. Sohn, who had known me from a child, understood this, and his idea was the true one. I shall always regret that picture that never was painted, it would have shown me exactly as I was, at that period of my life. I was the child of the forest, the forest-song, and have never wished to be aught else. The untamed and untamable in my nature, from which some good folk shrank in alarm, was just what pleased our kind artist-friend. Others might find my high spirits fatiguing, they were never so to him. My spontaneity, my frankness, refreshed him, and his heart melted towards this poor little child of Nature, who was to be forced against her will to become conventional—and even, without her knowing it, was being already educated to fit her for a throne! Anything rather than that, I should have said—for choice, a cottage, a little house hidden away in a wood—for I was not ambitious, at least my ambition took quite another direction. What could all worldly pomp mean to me, who had revelled in the forest-splendours, in the glories of Nature! The beeches of our lofty avenues would dwarf the finest columns ever reared to support a roof, and how poor and insignificant the hubbub of the crowd must sound, to ears accustomed to the mighty music of the storm-wind, making the tall trees bend and quiver in its path! In all this Sohn was of my way of thinking, and he had quick perceptions of the quieter beauties of Nature too, and never missed pointing out to me a single blossom sprouting, or an effect of sunlight through the intertwining branches. And he led me on to talk and pour out my confidences to him, and often broke into a hearty laugh at some unexpected sally. I was well willing, I told him, to devote myself to the service of my fellow-creatures, but not from a throne; I would live in their midst, to tend and comfort them. And the thought of marriage was hateful to me, for a husband, it seemed to me, must be a master, a sort of tyrant, but children I loved, and wished that I might have a dozen!

How heartily Sohn would laugh at all this, and then grow serious again, and crown my hair with glow-worms, as we strolled home through the twilight. I sang like the birds in those days, in the truest sense of the word, for every verse I made I sang to myself, in the joy of my heart. My life was full of poetry indeed—of poetry fostered by the surroundings. I have always thought that the happiest lot on earth is that of the mediatised princes. They are like little kings, but without the cares of government, enjoying the same liberty as people in private life, yet with a patriarchal interest in the weal and woe of all their people. Such happy mortals are generally beloved from their birth, their fortune suffices for their needs without awakening envy in others, and they have opportunities for indulging intellectual and artistic tastes, such as few others possess. Their country seat is generally some old castle, to which historic memories attach, probably with a fine library or picture gallery, and archeological treasures perhaps beneath the soil. As patrons of Art, as hosts to a company of well-chosen guests, as friends of scholars and men of letters, as descendants of forefathers renowned for talents and virtues, they are privileged beyond all others. And friends like Sohn must be counted among their best treasures!