V
THE YOUNG REFORMER
“Lift up thy praise to Life
That set thee in the strenuous ways,
And left thee not to drowse and rot
In some thick perfumed and luxurious plot.
“Strong, strong is Earth
With vigor for thy feet,
To make thy wayfaring
Tireless and fleet,
“And good is Earth,
But Earth not all thy good,
O thou with seeds of suns
And star-fire in thy blood.”
The early part of the year 1881 was spent by Theodore Roosevelt and his young wife with my mother at 6 West 57th Street, and was devoted largely to literary work and efforts to acquaint himself with the political interests of the district in which we lived.
During the following summer, they travelled in Europe; he climbed Swiss mountains and showed his usual capacity for surmounting obstacles. June 16, 1881, he writes from Paris in connection with artistic wanderings in the Louvre. “I have not admired any of the French painters much excepting Greuze. Rubens’ ‘Three Wives’ are reproduced in about fifty different ways, which I think a mistake. No painter can make the same face serve for Venus, the Virgin, and a Flemish lady.” And again on August 24 from Brussels: “I know nothing at all, in reality, of art, I regret to say, but I do know what pictures I like. I am not at all fond of Rubens; he is mentally a fleshly, sensuous painter, and yet his most famous pictures are those relating to the Divinity. Above all, he fails in his female figures. Rubens’ women are handsome animals except his pictures of rich Flemish house-wives, but they are either ludicrous or ugly when meant to represent either the Virgin or a Saint. I think they are not much better as heathen goddesses. I do not like a chubby Minerva, a corpulent Venus, or a Diana who is so fat that I know she could never overtake a cow, let alone a deer. Rembrandt is by all odds my favorite. I am very much attracted by his strongly contrasting coloring and I could sit for hours examining his heads; they are so life-like and impressive. Van Helst I like for the sake of the realism with which he presents to one, the bold, rich, turbulent Dutchman of his time. Vandyke’s heads are wonderful; they are very life-like and very powerful—but if the originals were like them, I should hardly have admired one of them. Perhaps, the pictures I really get most enjoyment out of are the landscapes, the homely little Dutch and Flemish interiors, the faithful representations of how the people of those times lived and made merry and died, which are given us by Jan Steen, Van Ostade, Teniers, and Ruysdael. They bring out the life of that period in a way no written history could do, and interest me far more than pictures of Saints and Madonnas. I suppose this sounds heretical but it is true. This time I have really tried to like the holy pictures but I cannot; even the Italian masters seem to me to represent good men and insipid, good women, but rarely anything saintly or divine. The only pictures I have seen with these attributes are Gustav Doree’s! He alone represents the Christ so that your pity for him is lost in intense admiration and reverence. Your loving brother.”
The above letter is one unusual in its type, because it was rare for Theodore Roosevelt to write as much about art. He always loved certain types of pictures, but his busy, active career had but small time for the more æsthetic interests! All these criticisms by the young man not yet twenty-three have their value because they show so distinctly the character of the young man himself. One sees the interest which he takes in his humankind as represented by certain types of Dutch pictures, and also his love for spiritual beauty, when not belittled by insipidity. Perhaps the last sentence of this letter is most characteristic of all of his own vital spirit. He does not wish to pity the Christ; he almost insists that pity must be lost in admiration and reverence. Pity always seemed to Theodore Roosevelt an undesirable quality; tenderest sympathy he gave and craved—but never pity.
After this brief artistic sojourn he plunged with great energy, on his return, into the drudgery of political life in his own district. Many were the criticisms of his friends and acquaintances at the thought of his taking up city or state politics from a serious standpoint. At that time, even more than now, “politics” was considered as something far removed from the life of any one brought up to other spheres than that of mud-slinging and corruption. All “politics” was more or less regarded as inextricably intertwined with the above. Theodore Roosevelt, however, realized from the very beginning of his life that “armchair” criticism was ineffectual, and, because ineffectual, undesirable. If one were to regard oneself in the light of a capable critic, the actual criticism immediately obligated the person indulging in it to do something about the matter. He often used to quote the old story of “Squeers” in “Nicholas Nickleby,” that admirable old novel of Charles Dickens, in which “Do the Boys’ Hall” was so amusingly described. Mr. Squeers, the master of the above school, would call up a pupil and ask him to spell window. He pronounced it “winder,” and the pupil in turn would spell it “w-i-n-d-e-r.” The spelling would not be corrected but the boy would receive the injunction to “go and wash it,” and my brother always said that while he did not approve of “Squeers’” spelling—nor indeed of other methods practised by him—that the “go and wash it” was an admirable method to follow in political life. The very fact that, although by no means a wealthy man, he had a sufficient competence to make it unnecessary for him to earn his own living, made him feel that he must devote his life largely to public affairs. He realized that unless the men of his type and caliber interested themselves in American government, the city, state, and country in which they lived would not have the benefit of educated minds and of incorruptible characters. He therefore set himself to work to learn the methods used in ordinary political life, and, by learning the methods, to fit himself to fight intelligently whatever he found unworthy of free American citizenship.