The Contributors' Club

TOWARDS the close of one afternoon, when George Fuller was tired, having been at work on two portraits all day, I dropped in, and we had a long, rambling talk about Millet, Corot, Henner, the old masters, and art in general. Fuller was in a genial, talkative, twilight mood, and I am sorry that I can remember only a part of what he said. He was a good talker, because he was so much in earnest. " Portraitpainting,” said he, “ is a downright grind, and if it were not so interesting it would be quite too hard work. My eyes get tired looking, and my legs walking to and fro. If I can satisfy the sitter’s family, I am happy. I was very shaky about the hands in Mr. ―’s portrait, and worked like fury over them. If he knew I was painting on the hands, those hands would grow perfectly rigid; so I tried to fool him, sometimes, by saying, Now I am going to work on the hair, or the coat; and then he would forget about his hands, so I got a chance to observe them when they were natural. His wife pleased me by saying, when she saw the portrait, ’ Those are his hands, sure enough, and nobody’s else.’ In that portrait of Miss―the dress bothered me more than a little. I repainted it I don’t know how many times. It was always too prominent. I wanted to get away from it; I wanted to get something between it and me. At last, when the sitter was not here, I simplified it, and got it to suit me better.”

I quote these remarks to show how carefully and devotedly he worked over every part of a portrait, till he was satisfied that it was as good as he could make it. In fact, more than a few persons were surprised by the portraits in the Fuller Memorial Exhibition: they had much “ quality,” and the best were remarkable for a warm and rich harmony of color.

Had Fuller been educated thoroughly in his art, I believe he would have left a name far greater than any of modern times. He hated his materials, because they impeded his utterance. Suppose him to have had them under almost perfect control, like Velasquez, and there is no saying what he, with his exquisite ideals, might not have accomplished. Of course this is supposing a great deal. As it is, he accomplished surprising things through force of will and loving labor, though a most faulty workman. He never had what is called facility in the slightest degree. Men who have it, he once remarked, seldom have anything important to say. I believe he was thinking of modern men when he said this, for he knew too much not to admire the mechanical superiority of many old Dutch and Flemish works, for instance, the motives of which could make no appeal to his sympathies. He regarded tricks of technique with indifference, if not with contempt. One of his favorite practices was to scrape his pictures with the brush-handle. He wished by this means to permit the cool grays of the under-painting to show through and temper the warm flesh-tones; but he finally carried the practice to excess, applying it apparently without discrimination to flesh, draperies, background, etc. It became a mannerism, but he defended it by saying that it made no difference which end of the brush you painted with ; a remark intended to cover the whole ground of the practice of the art, but which was liable to be misinterpreted. In point of fact, it makes no difference in the world which end of the brush you use, if you know what you want to do and how to do it. He never learned to draw well, and this defect was conspicuous in some of his leading works, whereas in others it was either hidden or vanquished. His sense of color, always fine, grew more delicate and more refined, so that some of his latest pictures are the best in this regard. It was interesting to see how he wrestled with a picture, now gaining and now losing ground, but never giving up until he got what he wanted. He always knew just what that was. It was not likely to be appreciated at once by others, but it was almost always beautiful in a certain original way, — sometimes exceedingly beautiful; and its beauty was of a sort that grew upon you and held you. Power of expression was the gift that made Fuller great. With all his faults he knew how to express personal character, and could thus create ideal works, destined to live. As he was integer vitƏ, scelertsque purus, and overflowed with the milk of human kindness, he was capable of feeling the moral beauty that dwells in maidens’ minds, and his youthful Winifred Dysart stands for all that is amiable, sweet, and true in our sisters.

To name his pictures was always a vexatious affair for him. One day there were several of ns in the studio looking at a painting which was almost finished. “ What shall I call it?” he asked. Various absurd suggestions were made and rejected: Doubt, Waiting, Listening, Suspicion, and the like. The picture was afterwards named Priscilla Fauntleroy. The title of Winifred Dysart created an untold amount of mystification. It was a pure invention, but every one thought it must be a character in fiction, and there were not wanting persons who insisted that they had read about such a person “ somewhere.” I do not know exactly when Arethusa was named, but it was not long before she was put on exhibition ; for many visitors to the studio had seen the unfinished work, during the two or three years it was in process of completion, and nothing was said about a name. Fuller had many misgivings about this picture, and asked me if in my judgment it would create scandal to put “ a nude ” on public exhibition in Boston. I thought not. He remarked that a certain painting by Benjamin Constant, lately exhibited, was, “ to all intents and purposes,” a much grosser picture than his, though not a nude. This was true enough. Every one who knew Fuller was aware of his unusual scrupulousness ; he believed in art as a didactic and ethical force as well as in “ art for art’s sake.” Beauty was to be loved because it was beauty, but he appreciated the fact that moral truth constituted the highest and most enduring form of beauty. It was this instinct, which inspired the Winifred Dysart, of which the unique value consists in its being a type. No artist has better expressed the purity and sweetness of maidenhood ; and what clearer title to fame could any one desire ? We have plenty of American artists who, in spite of superior educational advantages, great skill and facility, with all their industry and ambition, perhaps even endowed with exceptional taste, do not give the slightest promise of greatness. What was it that Fuller had and that they lack ? Nothing but an artist’s temperament. His hand was not as ready as the thought.

He never studied abroad, but spent about eight mouths in the year 1859 traveling in Europe and seeing the works of the old masters. He did not believe that American young men should seek instruction in Paris. He advised them to stay in this country. He considered that the time was almost ripe for the foundation of a national “ school ” of art, and that it was delayed by the denationalization of so many of our young men. “ They never outgrow the foreign habit of thought in which they are unconsciously being trained all the while they are in France,” he said. In his view, the manual training they received at the same time was not so perfect in its way as to atone for this calamity. Undoubtedly the artistic gods before which he himself first worshiped were the early Americans, — Allston, Stuart, and Copley. When he roomed with Thomas Ball, the sculptor, in Boston, in the early days, all the young artists looked upon Allston as the bright particular star in the American firmament. Afterwards, through all the palmy days of the Düsseldorf school and of the French school, Fuller brooded in the silence of his home over those gracious fancies of his which were later to find adequate expression on canvas, to bring him a measure of fame he hardly expected, but which was surely no more than his due.

— “All in your eye” is a common jocose remark which has more literal truth in it than is usually intended, the reference generally being to some whimsicality or prejudice in the mental vision of the person addressed. The physical eye often abuses the authority it enjoys over the other senses; it is a born hyperbolist, a kind of mercurial Gulliver, touching now at Lilliput, now at Brobdingnag, and returning with amusing, though sometimes fallacious, reports of what it has seen abroad. How can I trust implicitly my own eyes’ witness, when I take into account the prevarications practiced by the optic organs of other people ? Let the testimony of different sets of eyes be admitted, it would almost seem that no sublunary object is possessed of absolute and constant size ; or, to go higher, not even the moon itself appears of unvarying magnitude, since to one its disk is no larger than a dinner-plate, while to another it is exactly commensurate with a cart-wheel. As great diversity prevails even in the matter of estimating distance and making nice chromatic distinctions. It is all in the eye, or in the disciplining which the eye receives. Why does the natural, untrained sight so generally incline to magnify the object on which it rests ? Almost invariably the tyro enlarges the proportions of any design set him to copy.

The eye of a child and the eye of an aged person differ by something more than the degree of convexity in the visual lenses of each, by something more than the sharp sight of the one and the dim sight of the other. Something back of the eye plays the despot. From childhood the proportions of objects gradually but surely diminish to the beholder : the great houses of our early admiration dwindle, as by a reverse Arabian Nights charm ; the once frowning hills at length abase themselves, and become mere gentle land-waves ; besides, there are not now, as formerly, men of such notable stature as we once knew. Experience and conversance with new magnitudes and magnificent distances furnish us with other measuring criteria, sophisticate the simple eye, and lend it a prudence and moderation which it had not in the beginning. “ It is all in your eye,” cautions age ; “ It is all in your spectacles,” thinks youth.

— Is there conceivable any greater contrast of manner and method between two literary workmen than that between Daudet and the late Anthony Trollope? There is something very droll in the picture I make for myself of the two men sitting face to face, and expounding to each other their literary theories and individual modes of working. Imagine the inward amazement of the painstaking Daudet if he could have listened to the easy-going Trollope, as the latter related the history of his literary successes and of the system of labor to which he attributed them. Fancy the smile of good-natured compassion with which Trollope would have looked into the interior of the Frenchman’s mental workshop and seen him at his task of polishing a perfect page. Each would appreciate the other’s intellectual industry, while marveling at that on which it was expended, — in the one case the simple quantity of the product, in the other mainly the quality of the same. How could Trollope have comprehended even faintly the Frenchman’s anxious concern for the artistic finish of the form into which his conceptions were to be thrown ! Why should a man take the matter of writing a novel more or less with such intense seriousness, when if he would only set himself to work in a sensible, practical fashion, observing a few rules as to simplicity of expression and to hours of labor, nothing could be easier for him than to turn out a couple of novels a year that should please the great general public and put a comfortable number of pounds, or francs, into his pocket ? Nothing more than a little systematic regulation of one’s time and a common-sense, business-like way of managing one’s affairs was needful — as Trollope could prove by his own example—to secure success in literature as in any other way of getting a living. One might not make a fortune: seventy thousand pounds was of course no more than a fair remuneration for as many years of work as he himself had put into the novel-writing business ; yet it ought to satisfy any but a grasping man. Can we not see Daudet’s puzzled shake of the head as he gives up the attempt to fathom Monsieur Trollope’s philosophy? Seventy thousand pounds, or seventeen hundred thousand francs, roughly speaking, — the Englishman need not complain of fortune, certainly. And how many novels had he composed, did he say ? Ah, ’t was an enormous number ! A wonderful man, that Trollope.

Between the method of a Daudet and a Trollope, which to choose ? What is the outcome respectively of their labors ? Repelled by the English novelist’s lack of all grace of form, by the slovenliness and wearisome verbosity of his style and his uniform prosaic coloring, we may be tempted to deny him his due, to refuse him the recognition of his fidelity to the truth of the average human nature which he paints. The reverse is apt to be the case with the reader of Daudet, or other of the skillful French writers of to-day. Their charm is the thing first felt; the delightful conviction that we have to do with an artist who takes himself and his creative work most seriously, and who will treat us to no slouched, rough-cast, half-complete work. Only after continued perusal of these accomplished writers does the sense of something wanting make itself felt. Admirable as they are, highly as we enjoy them, we note the absence of a certain impression of reality ; there has not been enough of vital sympathy in the author with the humanity he would depict to create an illusion for the reader, who feels little or no warmth of personal interest in the characters, but is rather occupied mostly in pleased appreciation of the author’s cleverness of construction and charm of narrative and descriptive style. The result of Trollope’s intellectual activity is quite disproportionate to the effort itself. If the time spent on twenty novels had been given to the perfecting of four, the four would have been worth to us five times as much as the twenty. No wonder the man could write to order as he did, cutting off his manuscript in foot or yard lengths, according to the requirements of the publishers ! Does the outcome of Daudet’s minute and scrupulous labor justify the theory of literary art which guides him? If we want bread, a stone will not satisfy us, no matter how brilliant the crystal, nor how exquisitely cut. Yet we must acknowledge and allow the fact of every man’s limitations, and perhaps comment and complaint are needless and useless. Great writers are few in any period, we know, and the glory they win is “ the cry of gratitude ” with which mankind receives the benefit bestowed. When our Thackeray and George Eliot, our Balzac and George Sand, pass, we must try to put up contentedly with the gifts of the dii minores.

— There is a book by Fischer, a German scholar of high reputation, entitled Prolusiones de Vitiis Lexicorum, which may be freely translated as “ Fun made out of the Faults of Dictionaries,” — a subject which would be very funny indeed, were there not so much that is sadly serious involved in it. The fact probably is that there is very little of fresh work done in the making of what is called a new dictionary. Were the whole field passed under careful review, it would be the task of more than one life. A recent dictionary-maker employed as a proof-reader a scholar of preëminent learning and accuracy, but soon dispensed with his services, saying — and undoubtedly with perfect truth — that with such work the dictionary could not make its appearance till the middle of the next century. A large proportion of the matter in a new dictionary must, almost of necessity, be merely copied from those that went before. I have sometimes traced a false reference through half a score of dictionaries, and in one instance I have been for years attempting to find a Latin word in the book in which it is said to have been first used, but in which it occurs nowhere in the neighborhood of the place assigned to it in all dictionaries. I am not a young man, but I cannot remember when the term lymphatic was not currently applied to a dull, heavy (waterlogged ?) temperament. The question of its meaning was raised the other day in a friend’s house, and we looked in vain for the sense to which I have referred in three quite recent dictionaries, one of them being the Imperial, a work that makes very large pretensions. I have since examined several more, with the same result. In my edition of Worcester’s quarto, the adjective lymphatic is defined, “ 1. Enthusiastic ; raving ; insane ; mad. 2. (Anatomical.) Pertaining to lymph.” This is substantially the definition in all the dictionaries I have consulted (and they are not few), with the single exception of the quarto edition of Webster, 1882, in which (perhaps, too, in earlier editions) lymphatic, as au adjective, is defined, “1. Pertaining to, containing, or conveying lymph ; hence, as applied to temperament, heavy, dull. 2. Madly enthusiastic ; frantic. ( Obsolete.) ” This instance is but one of many in which the major part of our dictionaries have an antiquarian rather than a present value.

— I have tried to arrest in English the evanescent charm of Gautier’s human landscape: —

ÉLÉGIE.

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

ELEGY.

— From the same treasure - house whence I lately drew information concerning certain old sayings I have been able to gather the description of several kinds of dishes, drinks, etc., in vogue among our English ancestors, which may be of interest to some persons. First, let us hear what was the posset, a name with which we are all doubtless familiar. There was nothing remarkable about it, for it was composed simply of hot milk curdled by some strong infusion. It was held in great favor, however, both as a luxury and as a medicine. Our nearest approach to it is whey, or milk curdled with wine or acid. The posset made with sack was a treat usually prepared for bridegrooms. Macbeth alludes to this drink when, speaking of the king’s guards, he says, " I have drugged their possets.” An odd custom was that of putting the flowers called sops, but now called pinks, into wine at weddings, to give it a flavor. Cakes, wafers, etc., were generally blessed and put into the sweet wine which was presented to the bride ; and probably because in shape or color these cakes were thought to resemble the flowers, the former were called “ sops in wine.” Lamb’s-wool was the curious name for a favorite liquor of the common people, composed of ale and roasted apples, the pulp of the fruit being worked into a smooth mixture with the ale. Hippocras was a medicated drink of red wine with sugar and spices, also commonly given at weddings.

The manchet was a fine white roll, named, it is thought, either from the French michette or main, because small enough to hold in the hand. Manchets are used at Oxford and Cambridge today. One recipe for manchet, taken from the True Gentlewoman’s Delight, by Lady Arundel, date 1676, orders the compounder to take to a bushel (!) of fine wheat-flour twenty eggs and three pounds of fresh butter, together with salt and barm and “ new milk pretty hot.” Another later recipe makes of manchet what we should call a pudding; the directions being to put into a buttered dish a pound of minced beef suet mixed with a quart of cream, eight yolks of eggs and the whites of four, seasoning with nutmeg, cinnamon, rose water, and two grated manchets. Marchpane is a confection not unlike our macaroons, composed of sugar and almonds, according to an old housewife’s book called Delightes for Ladies, 1608. This cake is of very old origin, and was an especial favorite in olden times.

Speaking of the manchet being still eaten at the English universities reminds me of an anecdote told me by a friend of an American gentleman who was once dining at Cambridge, in company with various university dignitaries ; and after the long and stately meal was over, and the cloth removed, a waitingman brought in a large roll of linen, about half a yard wide, placed it on the table, and unrolled a very little of it, after which a great silver bowl was set in the middle of the board. The bowl was empty, and the whole ceremony passed unheeded by the company. The stranger guest had the curiosity to inquire of his neighbor the meaning of the observance. He, however, confessed his ignorance, and the question went round the table till it came to a person of antiquarian tastes, who said that the custom dated back to the days when gentlefolk ate with their fingers and used no napkins ; that then the bowl of water was passed to each guest that he might dip his fingers in it, drying them afterward upon the linen which was unrolled the length of the table as a common napkin. While still at table, or soon after the company left it, the American heard the sounding of a bell, and on asking for what purpose it rang he met with the same difficulty in getting an answer. Again the antiquarian came to the rescue with the information that it was the “ Fen-Bell,” rung at the same hour every evening, in accordance with the will of a person dead ages before, who once, belated on his homeward way, lost himself in the mist among the fens, and only found his road at last by help of a bell, which indicated to him the direction of the town ; in gratitude for which circumstance he ordained that a bell should ring at fixed hours of the evening, for all time to come, to guide the wanderer upon the marsh. The last of the fens having been drained hundreds of years since, the survival is an amusing instance of the English clinging to ancient usages. But the humor of the whole to the stranger present was the fashion in which the college dons took his inquiries. Apparently they had accepted those meaningless customs for an indefinite term of years, without a thought of challenging them, as part of the scheme of things, — like the rising and the setting of the sun, — and woke up to the question of their origin and meaning with as much bewilderment as though it had been suddenly demanded of them why two and two make four.