"Yes," said the venerable auctioneer, as he shook his white head, "yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows. She sports bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the public that loves art—or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River school. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled notions. Do you remember Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the Fortuny craze? His Gamblers, some figures sitting on the grass? Well, sir, seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched. Big price for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Meissonier, Bouguereau, and Detaille came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the picture counterfeiters' factories up on Montmartre were kept busy those times. It was after our Civil War. There were a lot of mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a Gérôme. Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand dollars—who offers me ten thousand dollars for this magnificent Munkaczy?' Nowadays I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present. He is too black. Our people ask for flashing colours. Rainbows. Fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they are falling off. A few seasons ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet you put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market, and the picture cranks are beginning to tire of the dull greys, soft blues, and sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier and his crowd. Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall. I tell you the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that? Interested in the greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse me, my dear sir, but that's pure rot. The public doesn't give a hang for technique. It wants a change. Indeed? Really? They have made a success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists. Such cubs! Well, I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the Academy. Perhaps young American painters may get their dues—some day. We may even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over fifty years, and I tell you again the public is a woman. One year it's dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats. Silks or satins. Lean or stout. All right. Coming—coming!" Clearing his throat, the old auctioneer slowly moves away.
THE JOY OF STARING
Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People. Our brethren! Mighty idea—but a stale one before Noah entered the ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal buttons on the coat of the Meissonier Cuirassier. It is great art. Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism—which only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence. (Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic? Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph—pictures that act. Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the mob.
A DILETTANTE
He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet, when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible, grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month in the year. So he rails at the dealers, inveighs against the artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Dürer; but he puts the blame upon his defective eyesight.
THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISE
Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then, will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable witticism persist in living? The answer is that in the United States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians. Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their increased knowledge of municipal topography. Society trooped northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.
The difference in the handling of the social "hammer" between Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia they say: "Dabs is going fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away with before dinner last night?" In Boston they say: "Dabs is quite hopeless. This afternoon he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of course, after that—!" Now, in New York, we usually dismiss the case in this fashion: "Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! Serves the idiot right. He never would take proper tips." Here are certain social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed clubmen. As the Chinese say: An image-maker never worships his idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked: "In hell, it's bad form to harp on the heat."