"This dish is Grecian. It was made five hundred years before the birth of Christ. This is a Chinese marble, but you see it has a Persian scroll in high relief. And this bronze urn: it is perhaps the oldest piece I have—about four thousand years—it is Chinese. But do you see this border on it? Perfect Greek! Where did the Chinese get that? Art is universal. We may call an object Greek, or Roman, or Assyrian, or Chinese, or Japanese, but as we begin to understand, we find that other races had the same thing—identical forms and designs. Take, for example, this painting of Whistler's, 'The Gold Screen.' You see he uses the Tosa design. The Tosa was used in Japan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and down to about twenty years ago. But there wasn't a single example of it in Europe in 1864, when Whistler painted 'The Gold Screen'; and Whistler had not been to the Orient. Then, where did he get the Tosa design? He invented
it. It came to him because he was a great artist, and art is universal."
It was like that—the spirit of it. And you must imagine the words spoken with measured distinctness in a deep, resonant voice, by a man with whom art is a religion and the pursuit of it a passion. He has a nature full of fire. At the mention of the name of the late J. P. Morgan, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or of certain Chinese collectors and painters of the distant past, a sort of holy flame of admiration rose and kindled in him. His contempt is also fire. A minor eruption occurred when the automobile industry was spoken of; a Vesuvian flare which reddened the sky and left the commercialism of the city in smoking ruins. But it was not until I chanced to mention the Detroit Museum of Art—an institution of which Mr. Freer strongly disapproves—that the great outburst came. His wrath was like an overpowering revolt of nature. A whirlwind of tempestuous fire mounted to the heavens and the museum emerged a clinker.
He went to our heads. We four, who saw and heard him, left Mr. Freer's house drunk with the esthetic. Even the flooding knowledge of our own barbarian ignorance was not enough to sober us. Some of the flame had gotten into us. It was like old brandy. We waved our arms and cried out about art. For there is in a truly big human being—especially in one old enough to have seemed to gain perspective on the universe—some quality which touches something in us that nothing else can ever reach. It is something which is not admiration only, nor vague longing to emulate, nor a quickened comprehension of the immensity of things; something emotional and spiritual and strange and indescribable which seems to set our souls to singing.
The Freer collection will go, ultimately, to the Smithsonian Institution (the National Gallery) in Washington, a fact which is the cause of deep regret to many persons in Detroit, more especially since the City Plan and Improvement Commission has completed arrangements for a Center of Arts and Letters—a fine group plan which will assemble and give suitable setting to a new Museum of Art, Public Library, and other buildings of like nature, including a School of Design and an Orchestra Hall. The site for the new gallery of art was purchased with funds supplied by public-spirited citizens, and the city has given a million dollars toward the erection of the building. Plans for the library have been drawn by Cass Gilbert.
It seems possible that, had the new art museum been started sooner, and with some guarantee of competent management, Mr. Freer might have considered it as an ultimate repository for his treasures. But now it is too late. That the present art museum—the old one—was not to be considered by him, is perfectly obvious. Inside and out it is unworthy. It looks as much like an old waterworks as the new waterworks out on Jefferson Avenue looks like a museum. Its foyer contains some sculptured busts, forming the most amazing group I have ever seen. The group represents, I take it, prominent citizens of Detroit—among them, according to my recollection, the following: Hermes, Augustus Cæsar, Mr. Bela Hubbard, Septimus Severus, the Hon. T. W. Palmer, Mr. Frederick Stearns, Apollo, Demosthenes, and the Hon. H. P. Lillibridge.
I do not want to put things into people's heads, but—the old museum is not fire-proof. God speed the new one!