The New Art Heroine

WHO that walks abroad does not know her, the not always beautiful but altogether fascinating young person to whom this epithet applies ? None but the blind escape the fair! She smiles at you alike from posters in the streets, and from the walls of this season’s Academy; she beckons you with alluring grace toward the newest vaudeville, and with more modest garb, and demure and downcast face, plays the saint in stone over a church door. Her sinuous arms hold out your electric-light bulb, and hold up your new art mantelpiece; she languishes upon the covers of your magazines, and curls with the nonchalance of petted indulgence about your cold-cream jar or your inkwell or your soup-tureen. Humani nihil a se alienum ! Indeed, you cannot avoid her, except in a desert, for though you take the wings of the morning, and flee to the uttermost parts, where you think the new art is not known, even there AngloSaxon enterprise will be before you, — and the New Art Heroine, its priestess and avatar, will offer you a box of Quattro-Cento Breakfast Food, or tell you that she uses only the Rossetti Hair Restorer.

What a disproportionate, radiantly impossible creature she is! An exotic, an anachronism, she is as far removed from the actual modern girl we know, of level gaze, healthy bloom, and merry heart, as she is from the classic ideal of perfect proportions and high serenity, — which is very far indeed. She is wholly inconsistent, all contradiction, belonging to no country, but drawing upon all ages and all climes for her charms. English BurneJones gave her her slender height, Italian Botticelli her dreamy sensuous face, German Overbeck clad her forever in mediæval costume. She has Titian hair, a Leonardo smile, and the gray-green eyes that Rossetti loved. In disposition, too, she seems to have something of French subtlety and of English bluntness, of the languorous warmth of the South countries and the cold fierceness of the North, — a combination that gives her, to say the least, the charm of the unexpected.

In my youth I adored the New Art Heroine, partly because of these incongruous attractions, and partly because of the air of mystery and unsatisfied longing that hung about her. At that fast-becoming-remote period, too, she was not often to be met with, and then only in the most exclusive society, so that my vanity was flattered by the acquaintance. Never to be found, in those days, in anything so open to the vulgar admiration as the magazines, she lurked evasively in poetry and unpopular paintings and unsuccessful novels. Occasionally my worshipful eyes chanced upon her in a picture-gallery or a stray print; and the hope of meeting with her inspired excursions into all sorts of poetry-books and romances. Her story was never a happy, and often not a creditable one; but what more glorious destiny for a heroine than to be endowed with lofty lineage, strange beauty, and a scornful disposition, to be wildly beloved and loving, and doomed to suffer!

A hint of her charms was sufficient reward for hours of arid reading, and placed the author at once on my index of immortals. It was really on her account that I first read Tennyson; for she was Guinevere and Enid and Elaine the fair, and no less the wily lissome Vivien, and Iseult of the fair hands; Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, Maud — ah, but all of Tennyson! His landscapes are settings for her, — his groves of straight-stemmed trees, his castles and pleasaunces, the isle of the lotoseaters, the little walled gardens, all suggest her presence, whether she is actually there or not. And I became for a while a devotee of William Morris, because he was hers. He made her his Guinevere and his Brunhilde; for her he dyed wool into strange tints, and wrought strange tapestries and built, strange furniture. It was not his fault, — poor idealizing artist! — if the people who bought his stuffs and sat in his chairs were plump and smug Philistines. The “inexpressive She” was their mistress in the spirit.

Somehow, I preferred adoration from a distance to a closer intimacy, and I perversely refused allegiance to the especial divinity of Rossetti and his brethren. It was their exaggeration of the distinguishing traits of the type that cooled me from rhapsody to analysis. A freakish whisper of common sense checks me on the verge of enthusiasm, and I see in the Pre-Raphaelite girl

She is something too long and limber, a hint too full-lipped and honey-feminine, to be companionable in one’s hours of ease. One might be expected to live up to her attitudes; and at best she makes a wearisome demand upon one’s admiration. Can you imagine a lover to match with her? Certainly no earth-born man with a business; and I confess, the PreRaphaelite man is beyond my flights! Rossetti’s is a manless world. I have my private doubts, too, as to the goodness of the Blessed Damosel. Her divine melancholy looks not a little like the sulks, and the unsympathetic might pronounce her devout abstraction to be laziness.

From the obscure but fervent worship of the few to the easy admiration of the many, is not a far cry, provided the few have lusty lungs. With Maeterlinck and Maurice Hewlett to lead the literary cheering, she has reached the top of the vogue. Curious, that the heroine of subtle delights should have become the artfashion of this materialistic age! Yet is it not characteristic of our seething, crosscurrent, much-alive time? We are cosmopolitan; the type of our cosmopolitanism is this polyglot creature, at home everywhere and calling no place home. We have conquered the material world; she stands as our confession of the inadequacy of material well-being, yearning for the unattainable, and restless under the goad of “almost.” The modern imagination, weary with the succession of normal experiences rich enough in themselves, craves the union of them all in one maddening whirl of sensation. The fastidious and pampered modern taste scorns healthy moderation and demands a flavor of olives in everything. Like the Roman emperor who demanded hot ice, it strives to bring extremes together in embrace, — to create a novel and undreamed-of loveliness by touching beauty with a suggestion of blight. Sweet and tender piety is infected and made irrational by a morbid, though picturesque, introspection. Having achieved all things in the range of sublunar ambition, we revert to our childish grievance, and cry for the moon. Yet in glorifying this same type we pass judgment on ourselves; for the level eyes and lurking smile must be read as disillusionment and self-distaste.

When a fashion is artistic, there’s beauty in civilization; but when art is the fashion, I tremble for both! The slang of trade and the jargon of art become confused and indistinguishable, — and signs are not lacking that art and trade are, by the same token, mixed. A dry-goods clerk not long ago urged, almost commanded, me to buy buttons of a particular pattern, because “they’re exactly what you want, madam. That’s the Last Novoo design, the very latest!” And I have heard more than one craftsman express his pride in his work with the phrase, “Now I call that a stylish thing. New arty, don’t you know!”

But for the present at least, the New Art Heroine is having it all her own way, from pictures to door-knobs. The New Art of design looks to her for inspiration and method as well; its key is the dainty parallelism of her slender form, curve answering to long curve. She is its type and symbol, and the ideal for whom all deeds are done. “Art is long,” — and our wallpapers grow flowers seven feet tall. If you are led by the truly informed, you will build a new art house and lay out a new art garden, regardless of your age or sex, height or weight, or previous condition of culture. You will sit at a new art table and dine off new art china; read the newest ideas in interior decoration from the new art magazines, and at last, reposing under eiderdown puffs of new art design, close your weary eyes upon the new art appointments of your room.

Some of us, I fancy, would cut a sorry picture if our staid and respectable personalities should be set in the midst of new art surroundings. Or, and it is within the possibilities, the surroundings might perhaps look a trifle affected and prettyfied. Certain it is that the new art house is not homelike. In their efforts to escape conventionality, some have fallen into the grasp of a conventionality that is yet worse, for it is both unnatural and uncomfortable. Is there not a little smack of Philistinism in such hatred of it, such eagerness to avoid it ? It is rather cheering, in this tyranny of the artisan-craftsman, to reflect that there is a minority of good souls still living, who with perfect amiability cling to the cozy, unaspiring ugliness of their early days.