There is a chastity of the mind, just as there is a chastity of the body. There are certain creative processes which a sincere thinker would no more reveal to casual eyes than he would strip in a public place. A rule of mental chastity: Do not hold promiscuous mental intercourse. The shallow would intrude into these austere places like picnickers in a sanctuary, littering it with their luncheon refuse. Let the artist raise his thought-stained face from his toil, smiling but mute.
Fritz guarded his secrets well. A sudden flash of arrested eye, a certain silent intentness of gaze, an interest in a subject which would seem altogether out of proportion to its importance, a look of perpetual expectancy were all that betrayed his search. He was learning, learning, learning: every hour, every minute. Sometimes for days together he would seem dormant—practical people would have said loafing—lazily absorbing impressions as it had been through his pores. Again he seemed to devour scenery, faces, books, ideas with an appetite that was insatiable.
A young sculptor, meeting Fritz, observed to me privately,
"What an unromantic exterior for an artist!"
The joke was too good to tell Fritz for, all innocently on the sculptor's part, it revealed a secret which I was not supposed to know: that Fritz instinctively cultivated this young-man-just-out-of-college-and-doing-well-in-business exterior as a high board fence behind which, free from intrusion, to train the muscles of his mind and cultivate the golden orchards of his soul.
He had to. For once he had mastered the tools of his trade there was absolutely no one to teach him the things he most needed to know. He must go it alone. He knew it. And he was going. That was the secret of the watchful, hungry look of him—the look of one aware of a ravenous appetite and never sure of his next meal. That was the secret of his inarticulate gratitude to anyone who happened to be able to put him in the way of finding the food his spirit craved. He discovered that the composers knew more about painting than most painters, and he used to turn up at Symphony concerts or at the opera with the look of a small boy fresh from a session with the jam pot behind the pantry door. He wasn't saying anything, but you knew that he'd got it. He made a bee-line for Beethoven and Wagner. He came away after a performance of Tristan most divinely drunk on the strongest wine in music.
For the method of these composers was the method which he had chosen for himself unconsciously. He was not satisfied to write a thin melody. He was determined to teach his brush the rich and complicated instrumentation of an orchestral score. Not this face or that landscape was what he planned to put on canvas, but the abundance of life which he had absorbed through every avenue of sense. Not a violin alone, nothing less than the full orchestra would content him.
I ask myself whether I shall ever see anything more inspiriting than the quiet, secret quest of this young man for an excellence and a mastery not only unrecognized and unrewarded by the social order in which he lived, but not even comprehended. This is the courage of the creative mind: that it is prepared to meet alike its triumph or its defeat in an utter moral solitude. Stories of the physical courage which Fritz displayed on the field of battle were to come later.... Which is likely to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on earth more speedily—the courage of the body, to destroy; or the courage of the mind, to create?
Is all this too eulogistic? "Oh, come! He must have had faults, weaknesses, common spots." ... I suppose so. To tell the truth I never noticed them. There was a trait, as I first remember him, of too ready assent to the opinions of others which it amused me to attribute to peasant ancestry; but, after all, that conformity was only outward and it soon disappeared. In matters really vital to him his will was granite and he commanded a silence which could vociferate "Hands off!"