But these French titles created by Napoleon, or the Italians, with titles created by the Papal Court, and the small fry of other countries, are really not worth while. Theirs are not titles; as some one has said, they are epitaphs; and the best thing to do with the young American girl who thinks she would like to be a princess is to take her abroad early in her life, and let her meet a few other American girls who have become princesses. After that, if she still wants to buy a prince and pay his debts and supply him with the credit to run into more debt, she has only herself to blame, and goes into it with her pretty eyes wide open. It will be then only too evident that she is fitted for nothing higher.
"WHAT MIGHT SOME TIME HAPPEN IF THESE WERE LOVE-MATCHES"
On no one class of visitor does Paris lay her spell more heavily than on the American art student. For, no matter where he has studied at home, or under what master, he finds when he reaches Paris so much that is new and beautiful and full of inspiration that he becomes as intolerant as are all recent converts, and so happy in his chosen profession that he looks upon everything else than art with impatience and contempt. As art is something about which there are many opinions, he too often passes rapidly on to the stage when he can see nothing to admire in any work save that which the master that he worships declares to be true, and he scorns every other form of expression and every other school and every other artist.
You almost envy the young man his certainty of mind and the unquestionableness of his opinion. He will take you through the Salon at a quick step, demolishing whole walls of pictures as he goes with a sweeping gesture of the hand, and will finally bring you breathless before a little picture, or a group of them, which, so he informs you, are the only ones in the exhibition worthy of consideration. And on the day following a young disciple of another school will escort you through the same rooms, and regard with pitying contempt the pictures which your friend of the day before has left standing, and will pick out somewhere near the roof a strange monstrosity, beneath which he will stand with bowed head, and upon which he will comment in a whisper.
It is an amusing pose, and most bewildering to a philistine like myself when he finds all the artists whom he had venerated denounced as photographers and decorators, or story-tellers and illustrators. I used to be quite ashamed of the ignorance which had left me so long unenlightened as to what was true and beautiful.
These boys have, perhaps, an aunt in Kansas City, or a mother in Lynn, Massachusetts, who is saving and pinching to send them fifteen or twenty dollars a week so that they can learn to be great painters, and they have not been in Paris a week before they have changed their entire view of art, and adopted a new method and a new master and a new religion. It is nowise derogatory to a boy to be supported by a fond aunt in Kansas City, who sends him fifteen dollars a week and the news of the social life of that place, but it is amusing to think how she and his cousins in the West would be awed if they heard him damn a picture by waving his thumb in the air at it, and saying, "It has a little too much of that," with a downward sweep of the thumb, "and not enough of this," with an upward sweep. For one hardly expects a youth who is still at Julien's, and who has not yet paid the first quarter's rent for his studio, to proclaim all the first painters of France as only fit to color photographs. It is as if some one were to say, "You can take away all of the books of the Boston Library and nothing will be lost, but spare three volumes of sonnets written by the only great writer of the present time, who is a friend of mine, and of whom no one knows but myself."