In the emptiness left by his death I came to realize that one of the principal anticipations of my life had been looking forward to watch, year by year, the unfolding of his mind and the ripening of his powers. His talent had long since passed the stage at which it was a sporting proposition—the stage at which one could chaff him about cashing in heavily some day on a pair of "early Demmlers."
There was no kind of doubt that he carried within him the creative "daimon." His very instincts betrayed it. He went at a landscape the way Hugo Wolf went at a song: he lived with the poem before creating the music. For the first few days in a novel countryside he never thought of touching brush to canvas. He walked around in the scene, his every sense alert to its feature and color, to its sound and smell. He laid in wait for its moods. He eyed it in every circumstance of wind and weather, as if it had been a face he was preparing to paint, or a woman he was preparing to wed. No words. The quality he most appreciated in a companion at such times was silence. And it was entertainment enough to watch the play of expression in his face as his eyes roamed meadow, hill or sea horizon—vigilance, delight, eagerness, discriminating study, instructions to memory, brooding thought—his life was a perpetual honeymoon with nature for his bride.
Then would come the day and the hour when he was ready to paint. By that time, in the wealth of his materials, his only study would be not what to put in but what to leave out. I doubt if he had reached the point of knowingly causing his subconscious to work for him, but it will be apparent from the foregoing that he was doing so unconsciously.
He was able, somehow, to communicate his sense of form and color to another, without resort to speech, or with only the fewest words. Perhaps it was the stimulus of seeing how much there was for him in the distant shining of sunlight on winding waters, or a range of low hills scrawling their signature on the chill blue of horizon sky, which taught others to find the wonder and dignity in what they would once have looked on as commonplace. At any rate, I find myself, in all seasons, seeing landscapes through his eyes.... "Now that looks commonplace, but it isn't. Fritz would have seen something in these somber March-brown meadows drowned in the freshets of spring; these red-budding birches; this delicate flush of pink in a drab evening sky...." And so he, being dead, yet seeth.
He was well aware, by this time, that the artist who is not also a thinker is a one-legged man. He accepted the obligation of understanding matters which, superficially, might have seemed far outside his province. It was in 1915 that he encountered Tolstoy's great work on Christian anarchism, The Kingdom of God Is Within You. It revolutionized his view of life. It convinced him of the futility of violence as a method of settling disputes, personal or national. And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his own right.
Next he encountered Romain Rolland's Life of Michael Angelo. Far from being chilled by the classic austerity of that work, it warmed him. In it he found the food he had been seeking. He made it a part of him. It confirmed, with revelations of the laws of mental conduct which governed that giant of the Renaissance, principles which this young man had been formulating and practising by the naked instinct of his will to create. Things which he had been doing or forbearing to do, he could not have told you why, here received their sanction or veto in the experience of a genius.
Little as was said about this between us, it was easy to see how profoundly this discovery of the similarity between his own mental processes and those of a great master had strengthened his confidence in himself. Michael Angelo was added to the list of his Great Companions.
He had another. Rembrandt.
There was a gallery in London, which one I forget, which he visited day after day.
"In the first room you entered," said he, "was a portrait of an old woman by Rembrandt, painted in his last period. Time after time I went there intending to see the rest of the gallery. Sometimes I even tried a room or two. What was the use? I went back to that portrait. It seemed like a waste of time to look at the other pictures. Everything they said—if they said anything—was said in that portrait by Rembrandt and said better. It seemed to me as if the whole history of humanity were concentrated in that old woman's face.... Finally I surrendered and went only to see that."