Chapter V: Part 5

I first met this artist at a garden-party, and he asked me if I did not think it dull, and took me for a walk up to Montmartre, talking all the way of what a great and beautiful mother Paris was to those who worked there. His home was in Maine, and he let me know, without reflecting on his native town, that he had been choked and cramped there, and that his life had been the life of a Siberian exile. Here he found people who could understand; here, the very statues and buildings gave him advice and encouragement; here were people who took him and his work seriously, and who helped him on to fresh endeavors, and who made work a delight.

"I have one picture in the Salon," he said, flushing with proper pride and pleasure, "and one has just gone to the World's Fair, and another has received an honorable mention at Munich. That's pretty good for my first year, is it not? And I'm only twenty-five years old now," he added, with his eyes smiling into the future at the great things he was to do. Nobody could resist the contagion of his enthusiasm and earnestness of purpose.

He was painting the portrait of some rich man's daughter at the time, and her family took a patronizing interest in him, and said it was a pity that he did not go out more into society and get commissions. They asked me to tell him to be more careful about his dress, and to suggest to him not to wear a high hat with a sack-coat. I told them to leave him alone, and not to worry about his clothes, or to suggest his running after people who had pretty daughters and money enough to have them painted. These people would run after him soon enough, if he went on as he had begun.

When I saw him on the boulevards the next summer he had to reintroduce himself; he was very smartly dressed, in a cheap way, and he was sipping silly little sweet juices in front of a café. He was flushed and nervous and tired looking, and rattled off a list of the fashionable people who were then in Paris as correctly as a _Galignani_ reporter could have done it.

"How's art?" I asked.

"Oh, very well," he replied. "I had a picture in the Salon last year, and another was commended at Munich, and I had another one at the Fair. That's pretty good for my first two years abroad, isn't it?"

The next year I saw him several times with various young women in the court-yard of the Grand Hôtel, than which there is probably no place in all Paris less Parisian. They seemed to be models in street dress, and were as easy to distinguish as a naval officer in citizen's clothes. He stopped me once again before I left Paris, and invited me to his studio to breakfast. I asked him what he had to show me there.

"I have three pictures," he said, "that I did the first six months I was here; they--"

"Yes, I know," I interrupted. "One was at last year's Salon, and one at the World's Fair, and the other took a prize at Munich. Is that all?"

He flushed a little, and laughed, and said, "Yes, that is all."

"Do you get much inspiration here?" I asked, pointing to the colored fountain and the piles of luggage and the ugly glass roof.

"I don't understand you," he said.

He put the card he had held out to me back in his case, and bowed grandly, and walked back to the girl he had left at one of the tables, and on my way out from the offices I saw him frowning into a glass before him. The girl was pulling him by the sleeve, but he apparently was not listening.

The American artist who has taken Paris properly has only kind words to speak of her. He is grateful for what she gave him, but he is not unmindful of his mother-country at home. He may complain when he returns of the mud in our streets, and the height of our seventeen-story buildings, and the ugliness of our elevated roads--and who does not? But if his own art is lasting and there is in his heart much constancy, his work will grow and continue in spite of these things, and will not droop from the lack of atmosphere about him. New York and every great city owns a number of these men who have studied in the French capital, and who speak of it as fondly as a man speaks of his college and of the years he spent there. They help to leaven the lump and to instruct others who have not had the chance that was given them to see and to learn of all these beautiful things. These are the men who made the Columbian Fair what it was, who taught their teacher and the whole world a lesson in what was possible in architecture and in statuary, in decoration and design. That was a much better and a much finer thing for them to have done than to have dragged on in Paris waiting for a ribbon or a medal. They are the best examples we have of the Americans who made use of Paris, instead of permitting Paris to make use of them. And because they did the one thing and avoided the other, they are now helping and enlightening their own people and a whole nation, and not selfishly waiting in a foreign capital for a place on a jury for themselves.

THE END

Transcriber's Note: 1. Obvious punctuation and typographical errors repaired. 2. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=.