About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

Of course one must admire loyalty of that sort, for when it is loyalty to an idea it cannot help but be fine and sometimes noble, though it is a trifle amusing as well. It is just this tenacity of belief in one's own work, and just this intolerance of the work of others, that make Paris inspiring. A man cannot help but be in earnest, if he amounts to anything at all, when on every side he hears his work attacked or vaunted to the skies. As long as the question asked is "Is it art?" and not "Will it sell?" and "Is it popular?" the influence must be for good.

These students, in their loyalty to the particular school they admire, of course proclaim their belief in every public and private place, and are ever on their guard, but it is in their studios that they have set up their gods and established their doctrines most firmly.

One of these young men, whom I had known at college, took me to his studio last summer, and asked me to tell him how I liked it. It was a most embarrassing question to me, for to my untrained eye the rooms seemed to be stricken with poverty, and so bare as to appear untenanted. I said, at last, that he had a very fine view from his windows.

"Yes, but you say nothing of the room itself," he protested; "and I have spent so much time and thought on it. I have been a year and a half in arranging this room."

"But there is nothing in it," I objected; "you couldn't have taken a year and a half to arrange these things. There is not enough of them. It shouldn't have taken more than half an hour."

He smiled with a sweet, superior smile, and shook his head at me. "I am afraid," he said, "that you are one of those people who like studios filled with tapestries and armor and palms and huge, hideous chests of carved wood. You are probably the sort of person who would hang a tennis-racket on his wall and consider it decorative. We believe in lines and subdued colors and broad, bare surfaces. There is nothing in this room that has not a meaning of its own. You are quite right; there is very little in it; but what is here could not be altered or changed without spoiling the harmony of the whole, and nothing in it could be replaced or improved upon."

I regarded the studio with renewed interest at this, and took a mental inventory of its contents for my own improvement. I was guiltily conscious that once at college I had placed two lacrosse-sticks over my doorway, and what made it worse was that I did not play lacrosse, and that they had been borrowed from the man up-stairs for decorative purposes solely. I hoped my artist friend would not question me too closely. His room had a bare floor and gray walls and a green door. There was a long, low bookcase, and a straight-legged table, on which stood, ranged against the wall, a blue and white jar, a gold Buddha, and a jade bottle. On one wall hung a gray silk poke-bonnet, of the fashion of the year 1830, and on another an empty gold frame. With the exception of three chairs there was nothing else in the room. I moved slightly, and with the nervous fear that if I disturbed or disarranged anything the bare gray walls might fall in on me. And then I asked him why he did not put a picture in his frame.

"Ah, exactly!" he exclaimed, triumphantly; "that shows exactly what you are; you are an American philistine. You cannot see that a picture is a beautiful thing in itself, and that a dead-gold frame with its four straight lines is beautiful also; but together they might not be beautiful. That gray wall needs a spot on it, and so I hung that gold frame there, not because it was a frame, but because it was beautiful; for the same reason I hung that eighteen-thirty bonnet on the other wall. The two grays harmonize. People do not generally hang bonnets on walls, but that is because they regard them as things of use, and not as things of beauty."

I pointed with my stick at the three lonely ornaments on the solitary table. "Then if you were to put the blue and white jar on the right of the Buddha, instead of on the left," I asked, "the whole room would feel the shock?"