The Real Thing

— I have recently run across two instances of generosity that seem to me almost ideally representative of that much misunderstood quality. I have always held that to be generous, in the nice sense of the word, demands a certain spiritual temper, not too thoughtlessly benevolent, and given to a just appreciation of the value of things; and this temper I have found in two people as far as possible removed from each other in all that pertains to their manner of life and outward circumstances. The first instance is that of a girl clerk in a down-town office, earning but a few dollars a week, who had been saving, after the disheartening fashion of women, until she had enough money to buy a bicycle. She had a rudimentary passion for perfectness, and her heart had been fixed on a high-priced machine, delicate in mechanism and beautiful to the eye, but she surprised her friends by getting instead one of a cheaper grade. When asked her reason for the change, she said that she wanted to feel perfectly free to lend her wheel, and at the eleventh hour had doubted her ability cordially to offer the one she coveted.

The second instance is perhaps of purer essence than the first, for in the mere act of choosing the cheaper wheel there was a suggestion of thrift. There is none in the following.

A man, a painter, found one day that to him, as to many of us, the fashions and poses of civilization had become a weariness; in spite of an energy and an insight that made him closely akin to the sixteenthcentury masters his mind flagged, and he looked about him for a green spot of unrecorded nature in which to rest awhile. He was not easy to satisfy, and before he found what he wanted he had wandered very far away. When he returned, he brought back with him memoranda that could never be duplicated, and that held suggestions and memories of a curious and primitive life that soon must vanish from the face of the earth. These notes of line and color he guarded as closely as you may imagine manuscripts were guarded before the day of Gutenberg. None hut himself had access to them, and when they were shown it was in his room, with all precautions taken against injury or loss.

One day, however, the artist happened to hear that the wife of one of his friends, an invalid of many years, whom he had never seen, had expressed an interest in the sketches. Possibly it was in part the poetry of it that attracted him, — the piteous desire of a sensitive soul, bound to its couch, for that freedom of eye and thought which should carry it across continents and seas to the little island known only to the boldest travelers. Be that as it may, he took up his wonderful portfolio, and put it into the hands of his friend to carry home and keep so long as it should please his wife. There was not a word of caution, there was not a moment of hesitation; it was the princely surrender of a treasure the worth of which only an artist, and only such an artist, could fully know. His friend, who is my friend also, and from whom I heard the story, is a poor man. I know his plain rooms, and I can imagine that upper bedroom flooded suddenly with tropical color aud light. I can imagine the eyes of his wife resting on the luxuriant beauty of cocoanut palms leaning to a sea of unutterable blue, on lithe and joyous forms full of the vigor of life, on the dusky glow of primeval forests, on all that was most remote and foreign to her cloistered days; and it seems to me that the word “ generous ” most perfectly fits the act of the painter.