The Contributors' Club

THE fact that the frenzied Andromaque of Georges Rochegrosse carried away the first prize of the Salon of 1883 is not calculated to diminish an unpleasant impression of contemporary French art which every observant visitor must have received from this Salon. To the praise of English art, it can be said that no such offensive impression ever results from closest acquaintance with the Royal Academy exhibitions. Although the brio and bravura of Continental technique mocks at the more limited skill, the dulcet sentimentality and conventional morality, of the British school, the cultivated public at large has a right to insist that the art which shocks and disgusts the spiritual sensibilities of humanity is inferior to that which does not, however the former may excel in pleasing a trained hut artificial sense for composition and form. A truth of which artists themselves are so often profoundly ignorant is that art is an expression of the ideal part of universal humanity, not an exclusive right of those who paint and carve ; and he to whom is given the mere brain and hand power, which is but a simple medium of expression, has no more right to limit what that expression may or may not he than he who learns a language has to assert what imaginative or spiritual impulse may or may not flow through it. As well might the poet declare that the sole purpose of his art ought to be the musical quantity and rhythm that tickle the ear, or the architect that architecture, and not human need, is the fundamental purpose of building.

To those who look upon contemporaneous French art from the stand-point of spiritual and imaginative humanity, and not from that of the sense-absorbed colorist and draughtsman, indications are not wanting that the art of which the Salon is the annual exponent is narrowing itself away from any other ideal than that of mere painting, and therefore approaching to the floridity and exuberance of expression for mere expression’s sake which degraded the Italian art of the seventeenth century, and made that art as full-bodied but as soulless as the art of Pope’s Song by a Person of Quality. Curiously enough, this element of decadence was introduced into both Italian and French art by the most vital and vigorous of romantic humanists ; and what Michael Angelo’s titanic unrestraint did for his less imaginative followers, Delacroix’s passion for abrupt light and shade and twisted “ romantic ” attitudes may yet do for the Salon.

The success of Rochegrosse’s Andromaque is a mere craftsman’s triumph, not an artist’s ; for nothing can be consummately artistic while horrible and repulsive, as is this gory, ghastly scene. One need only to imagine it placed in a gallery of work of the full-blooming Florentine Renaissance, that rich, thoughtful, serene, and immortal period, to realize what fatal element of decay exists in a school which gives its highest commendation to such scientific brutality as this.

The incident of the picture is Andromaque’s agonized struggle when her infant son is torn from her arms, by the order of Ulysses, to be thrown from the ramparts. Convulsive is the first impression one receives from the violent foreshortenings and abrupt shadows, masterly as they are as mere craftsmanship. The action of the central figure, this raging, distorted, disheveled Audromaque, whose very hair, even, seems to rage and writhe in mortal throes, is as strained and painful as could be conceived. Death is all about, — putrid death, green and loathsome, as well as violent death, in its first hideous expression of gaping, staring surprise. Though the legend is classical, not the least faint shadow rests upon it of such antique dignity and calm as stamp even the Laocoön and group of the Farnese Bull.

All who remember this same artist’s picture of last year, representing Vitellius hooted at by the mob, a canvas crowded with repulsive figures and disheveled by a raggedness of light and shade suggestive of some rending and violent explosion, will recognize that in this purely technical success the most imaginative and least mechanical element, even of mere technique, is wanting, — the element of color. Rochegrosse is no colorist, and the monochromatic dullness of his canvas of this year, beside the cheap, calico-like surface of the one of last, impresses the observer more than ever that scientific knowledge and dashing skill, rather than ideal or even sensuous beauty, are the qualities valued by those who award the prizes of the French Salon, and thus represent French art.

Bin’s Mort à la Peine, or Death and the Woodcutter, as it has been also called, is another of the season’s successes which illustrate certain tendencies. It is not a furious canvas, like the Andromaque, but one with quite as little elevation or beauty of sentiment animating its skill ; even the pathos which the subject might otherwise possess being buried beneath a piling-up of more effective horrors. The woodman, just killed by a false stroke of his own axe, lies amid a huge circumference of blood. The face is unutterably repulsive in its dingy pallor, sunken - eyed, open-mouthed, and with its last living expression of agonized terror frozen upon it. Vultures hover low over the corpse, adding such a sickening, imaginative influence to the scene as not all their scientific effectiveness in “ continuing a line ” or enhancing a light ought ever to atone for. The draughtsmanship is powerful, firm, and sweeping; the wooded landscape artistically subordinate and receding, dull and unassertive, behind the masterly modeling of figures ; but the whole spiritual effect of the picture is to send one away with both sick and pained realization of the miserable tragedies to which hapless humanity is liable, — tragedies without dignity, all brutal horror, agony, and disgust.

The Crucifixions of this year, not less numerous than usual, mark also with pregnant emphasis this characteristic of to-day’s French art. Not one of them, vital point of the religious life of millions though that scene is, would awake a single heavenward-aspiring thought, or even tender earthly emotion. A small canvas — representing a lurid, cloud-tossed midnight, and the solitary figure of a dancing-girl just from some scene of revelry, in modern stage tights, with bare breasts and arms, stretching on tiptoe, up from a donkey’s back, to passionately kiss the impenitent thief, — is the only one which does not sooner stir the coarser passions of hate and revenge against the crueifiers than of love, pity, or reverence for the Crucified. In all these pictures, the showy, colorful, and color-focusing blood is always scientifically arranged, and largely en evidence, while the anatomical and muscular expression of the mortal leaves no place for suggestion of the divine agony.

A huge canvas by Brunet, pupil of Gerome and Boulanger, is singular among these in representing Les Gibets du Golgotha, with the central figure left out! The two thieves, apparently studied from long-dead and decomposed models, are tied with ropes to their crosses. Those crosses are huge, towering, massive, and richly bitumened ones, which Hercules himself could not have borne, and which in the hard realism of modern French art have no symbolical significance as representing the sins of the world. The feet and hands of the thieves are pierced with huge nails, but only Christ seems to have bled. His vacant cross stands there, horrible above all the horrors.

The subject is too repulsive to pursue longer, and the writer will only allude en passant to such scenes as Une Boucherie pendant le Siège, which degraded color and drawing worthy of better use. Briefly, too, must be mentioned the climax of hideous brutality of the whole exhibition, L’Alcool of Anatole Beaulieu, one of Eugene Delacroix’s pupils. The art which has given the world the Sistine Madonna has fallen as low in this canvas as the art which created Dorothea Brooke fell in the creation of Nana.

— There is a charge commonly brought against dwellers in capital cities from which, in the interest of fair judgment, I should like to defend them, — I mean the accusation of a frivolity of life far exceeding that of the inhabitants of rural towns and villages. In a loose use of language, frivolity is taken to mean the same thing as dissipation, or at least a preoccupation with the pleasures of the gay world. But frivolity is, properly speaking, but another name for trifling, and a frivolous life is one spent in trivial pursuits. There are frivolous persons to be found everywhere, and, according to my view, the life of large cities is no more favorable to the production of a trivial temper of mind and habit of existence than that of smaller districts. Even worldliness is less a matter of external activities than of interior disposition. There are country girls with all the will to be as worldly as the gayest city belle, and who display the worldly spirit just as far as they have opportunity to do so ; and city girls who are not worldly, though with every temptation to estimate social enjoyment and social success above things nobler. I have heard good people declaim against the social life of cities as if there were really something criminal in a fondness for dinner parties, receptions, and balls, and a high degree of virtue in abstaining from such pleasures by those who could not have them if they would. I have had considerable experience of life in rural towns, and so far as it informs me I am willing to maintain that life in them is no more earnest, dignified with worthy interests and aims, than life in cities, but merely a less busy and a duller thing. The frivolous city girl’s day is filled with engagements from morning to night, — with shopping, paying and receiving visits, driving in the park, and theatre or ball going in the evening. Her mind is taken up with these things to the exclusion of anything like intellectual occupation, — for novel-reading does not come under that head. She is absorbed in pleasure-seeking in all its various kinds. The frivolous country girl has more time on her hands, but does she do anything better with it ? She, too, seeks her pleasures, as many as are to be had, and sighs that there are no more of them. She shops and pays calls, and plays tennis in the afternoon instead of driving on the avenue; wishes there were a dance for the evening, but since there is not stays at home and does some fancy-work, finishes her novel, or chats with some intimate who “ drops in ” on her. What real difference in her character is made by the fact that she has had but one party to attend during the week, where the other girl has had six ? Is worldliness worse because it is on a larger scale ? Is scandal about the last elopement in fashionable society more demoralizing than gossip about one’s next-door neighbor’s son and the attention he is paying to Miss So-andSo ? The virtue of minding one’s own business is not more commonly practiced in rural places than in larger ones. I know of city girls who mingle with their pleasures an active care for the poor and sick, spending as much thought and time in charitable work as those who, living in country places, have less demand upon their leisure. It is sad to see a man or woman spending life in thoughtless gayety ; to me, it is equally sad to see one wasting it in simple, negatively virtuous inanity. I know certain worthy persons the mere sight of whom is depressing beyond words. The vacancy of their minds oppresses me as a suspension in a strain of music distresses the ear; the dullness of their undeveloped sensibilities, the contraction of the mental and spiritual space they are shut up in, affects me as a positive pain. If it were an external necessity that compelled to this way of existence, the case would be hard enough; but being, as I know it is, the result of choice and habit, and that, again, the outcome of sluggish temperament and minds deprived of proper stimulus, the pity of it is so much the greater. Sometimes such people do suffer from this species of self-starvation, yet without knowing it, or at least without comprehension of the true cause of their dull unrest. Perhaps it is just such a one, of all persons, whom you will hear speaking in disparagement of “ fashionable ” society. In the name of reason, one exclaims internally, is it not better at least to enjoy one’s self than to make an absolute nothing of one’s life ? To be pleased with trifles is at least no crime, but you would make it a virtue to be pleased with nothing. Life, for such of us, is what we can make out of ourselves and circumstances ; and some know how to make so much out of so little, others so little out of so much. No, frivolity is no more a natural consequence of living in capitals than in country places. There is more temptation to worldliness of spirit, doubtless, but whether the actual amount of it be larger in the former than in the latter there is no very precise means of determining. As to vice (not crime), there is as much in proportion in our rural places as in any city. Ask the clergyman and the physician of the village or the township, and he will tell you if it be not so.

— In speaking of a fly-trapper rather than of a fly-trap, I do so advisedly ; since the object I wish to describe acts from its own volition, possesses rational intelligence, has articulate speech, is capable of handling tools, laughs, — in short, displays all the faculties and traits characteristic of the highest order of animal life. I sometimes think that my friend the fly-trapper, in view of the singular use he serves in the economy of nature, should be set off in a genus by himself; at least, he should be accounted as sui generis, in the fullest acceptation of that convenient term. Your first impression regarding him would doubtless be : Here is one laboring under mania ; he sees what I cannot see ; he grasps in the air at impalpable nothings. You would be much relieved upon discovering that he was catching flies, — an action with him as sane and normal as any harmless idiosyncrasy in your own behavior. With the exception of this peculiar habit, the fly-trapper is very much like other rural folk with whom we are acquainted : hardworking, rheumatism-plagued, weatherforecasting, one-newspaper-reading, politics-and-theology-debating. The lastnamed trait is, in his case, rather more strongly developed than is usual, and I have known him, when he had a good listener, to stretch most unthriftily the harvest noon hour, in order that he might fully define “ the ground I take,” on any given question of a political or religious nature. At such times he is more than ever expert at the practice for which he is so justly distinguished in his own neighborhood. It is indeed wonderful, — the double presence of mind by which he is enabled to carry on argumentative discourse and at the same time attend to the flies. If one of those insects alight on the wall, or the table, anywhere within arm range, it is to the grief of that insect, for the hand of its fate is relentless and unerring. The trapper is also a good marksman, and can take a fly upon the wing as well as in any other situation ; apparently, he knows just how long the insect will he in moving from a given point over a given space. Often have I watched the slow, pendulum - like swing of his arm, bringing up, at length, with fingers shut upon the palm and the unlucky fly. I feel sure that this timely and triumphant gesture serves the speaker as well as would exact logic and verbal force. It is a little strange, however, that the coup de grace always falls at the right instant to clench the argument. I own to a feeling of fascination, while listening to his exposition of Foreknowledge and Foreordination, — the doctrines are so capitally illustrated ; the flies figuring as wretched humanity, and the fly-trapper as the dread Predestinator. From the twinkle in his eye, when a successful sweep has been made, and the hapless victim crumpled between thumb and finger, I infer perfectly well the satisfaction a supreme being must take in dooming its abject creatures. I have been assured by those who have excellent opportunities for observation that a little circle of the slain is always to he found upon the floor around the chair occupied by the trapper. There can be no reasonable doubt that, like the great little tailor in the German fairy tale, our hero has killed his “ seven at one stroke,” though it has never occurred to his modest spirit to vaunt itself on that account. To compare him with Dotnitian, who also was an adept in this line, would be to do an injustice to a very humane character ; for, when you have excepted the fly-catching propensity, you, as the representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, can find no stain upon our friend’s record.

I cannot say how long the subject of this notice has been in practice (he is now in his sixtieth year), yet probably for more than half a century, from the time when he sat an urchin on the high seat in the district school, he has served in the humble but useful way described. I know how strong is the force of habit, and forbear to laugh when occasionally I see him at his fly-catching after the fly season is past. Is it that his deft hand cannot forget its cunning, or was its dexterity always a vain show, — no real fly in the case ?

— Whence is it that so many English writers derive grammatical authority for the phrase “ different to ” ? To us, who use the word from in this combination, the common English substitution of to sounds very strange. “ My feeling is different to yours,” “ This is a very different matter to that,” — one finds such sentences in almost any English book. I am not sure that I have ever seen the preposition “ to ” used with the present tense of the verb, as “ This differs to that,” though to be consistent Englishmen should so express themselves. Consistency, however, is hardly an English characteristic. There are writers of good English who still write “different from,” — Mr. James Bryce, F. D. Maurice, Miss Yonge, to instance some at haphazard ; but the majority of British writers do not. If we Americans and the few English who agree to prefer from are in error, it is because our conservative instinct has led us to follow the pattern of speech set in this matter by Hooker and by Fielding, who who were thought to write well in their day.

It has been pointed out before now that certain queer Americanisms, so called, are but survivals of old English which happen to have fallen out of use in the mother country.

— I have a moral perplexity which I am anxious to share. Some time ago my friend and I enjoyed the honor of an interview with an eminent philanthropist. She (the philanthropist is a woman) has given her youth, her health, and her fortune to the work in which she is engaged. She has done this not only ungrudgingly and cheerfully, but almost, it would seem, unconsciously, possessed by the purest enthusiasm for the unhappy creatures whom she has befriended. She is still on the borders of youth, very clever, and would be good-looking but for her expression of invincible determination.

She explained her work and its results — which are truly marvelous — at length.

Now here comes my perplexity. It shaped itself while I listened. The philanthropist is a noble, an admirable woman ; more and more was I impressed with the conviction of her worth and our worthlessness. Surely (thus my perplexity grew into words) such a woman ought to be most attractive, but — she is nothing of the kind ! My friend, who does not believe in charity, and frankly objects to “ going on a high moral plane,” is an eminently charming woman. She charms every one. I could see that she charmed the philanthropist with her sweet politeness. But the philanthropist is not charming. Yet I somehow felt that Nature had meant her to be winning and gracious. She has most beautiful eyes, her rare smile is delightful, her features are delicate, her figure is good ; but somehow there was such an uncompromising and resistless energy about every look and movement that the timid, unphilanthropic mind quailed before her. She scorned the arts of the toilet; a severe neatness was her aim, — nothing more. She walked with a stern determination to get over the ground with as few steps as possible. Her gestures were entirely unconventional, and chiefly noticeable for vigor. When she talked, her pleasant voice had a ring of military firmness which made it stern. Her conversation was quite in keeping with her appearance. She talked fluently, rapidly, forcibly ; she was picturesque, interesting, enthusiastic. In a word, her conversation was that of a woman of wide and extraordinary experience, who had the courage of her opinions. But it was, so to speak, conversation on a straight line, disturbed by no curves of fancy, no flourishes of humor, no side branchings into appreciation of others’ views of the question. It would be too much to say that my philanthropist was arrogant, but she certainly lacked sympathy for all opinions save her own.

Of course, we, being unprincipled worldlings, dissembled our own private beliefs, and agreed with her by our silence, if not by our words.

When it was all over, my friend said, “ So that is a woman in earnest. Do you suppose it is her earnestness that makes her so unprepossessing ? ”

This is my perplexity reduced to its last equation : Was it her earnestness ?

My friend held that it was. “ If you have observed,” said she, women with aims are always like that. They are too superior to condescend to make themselves agreeable. Besides, they have n’t time. Then they never can see but one side of a question, — the side they are on. They are always dragging their own opinions to the front, and always running full tilt against every one else’s. That is where they differ most from women who have n’t purposes and who have seen a good deal of the world. It is the business of a woman of the world to be agreeable. She spares no pains to make herself just as good-looking as possible, and just as charming. And she is always tolerant. She may think you a fool for your beliefs, but she does n’t tell you so brutally, or try to crush you with an avalanche of argument. She tries to look at the matter from your point of view; in short, she feigns a sympathy, if she have it not. Your women with a purpose think it wrong to feign anything. They won’t pretend to be sympathetic any more than they will powder their faces, or let their dressmaker improve their figures. That’s why they are so boring ; they are too narrow to be sympathetic and too conscientious to be polite. It is earnestness does it; earnestness is naturally narrowing. It is earnestness, too, sets their nerves in a quiver and makes them so restless. They can never sit still; they are always twitching, don’t you know ? That’s earnestness. It has a kind of electrical effect. Women in earnest have no repose of manner. But a woman of the world feigns that, just as she feigns sympathy, because it makes her pleasant to other people. Oh, there’s no doubt of it: women with a purpose are vastly better than other women, but they are not nearly so nice ! ”

My own experience corroborates my friend’s opinions. Women with a purpose, women in earnest, have a noticeable lack of charm. And I regret to say that the nobility of the purpose does not in the least affect the quantity of charm. Very likely their busy lives and the hard fight they have had to wage with social prejudices and moral anachronisms may have something to do with it.

But after making all deductions, I wonder if my friend’s theory does not hit somewhere near the mark !