Immortal Youth Part 4

I wonder if Romain Rolland realizes the intimacy of the friendship which has sprung up between _Jean-Christophe_ and the youth of to-day.

Fritz and Christophe took an amazing shine to each other from the start. It was _Christophe_ who led Fritz to read everything else of Romain Rolland he could find, and thus his steps were guided to the summit of that Mount of Vision, Rolland's _Life of Tolstoy_, whence he looked far and wide into the stern grandeur of that moral wilderness unsubdued by man through which the heroic thinker and prophet pushes on alone.... To look is to follow. He began to devour Tolstoy's works.

_The Kreutzer Sonata_ he sat up half the night beside my fire to finish. Waking towards morning I saw him scowling over it. He asked to take the book away with him. Soon he was up to his neck in the dramatists: Ibsen, Strindberg, Brieux, Sudermann, Galsworthy, Synge, Shaw.

There was a performance of _Candida_ with Mr. Milton Rosmer as the poet. They say that a secret can be told only to him who knows it already. There is a secret in two tremendous speeches at the close of that play which (as the dramatist himself says) few but poets know:

MORELL: (_alarmed_) Candida: don't let him do anything rash.

CANDIDA: (_confident, smiling at Eugene_) Oh, there is no fear.

He has learnt to live without happiness.

MARCHBANKS: I no longer desire happiness: life is n.o.bler than that. Parson James, I give you my happiness with both hands.

Those lines stung Fritz as the whip stings a mettled horse. His flesh rebelled, but the poet in him leaped to the truth.

On March 20, 1913, the colony at 94 Charles Street adjourned to a performance of _Man and Superman_. Fritz kept his room-mate up until two in the morning discussing it. The next night he routed me out of bed at ten and quizzed me about it until three in the morning.

He had had his glimpse of the collision between s.e.x and ambition; between the impulse of the woman to create children of flesh and blood, with the man as adjunct and provider; and the impulse of the man to create children of the spirit independently of the woman. He was quick to realize that he had struck something which he had to settle, and he was settling it. The thing was deliciously transparent.

Here was a young gentleman tremendously in earnest about being an artist. Being an artist he loved beauty. Hitherto, in his shy way, he had secretly been rather tickled by the flutter which his striking head created in the dove cots of pretty girls. But after March 20, 1913, the tune changed. He was affable, delighted to make their acquaintance--but on his guard. He had not the slightest intention of letting s.e.x thwart his ambition.

"Yes, but...?"

"Yes, but...." He played the game. A commercial society decrees that the artist cannot have a livelihood until his work is accepted at a commercial value. Pending that acceptance, if he a.s.sumes the responsibility of wife and children he also a.s.sumes the risk of shackling himself to pot-boiling work for life.

Society also decrees a standard of prenuptial chast.i.ty for the male.

Suppose the male happens to be more interested in art than in domesticity. He must then ask himself whether he shall abide by a decree which bourgeois society promulgates with more emphasis than sincerity. With his eyes wide open to the fact that the very society which promulgates this decree openly winks at its evasion, Fritz abode by it. A slightly sterner set to his jaw; a slightly darker flash in his eye; a slightly grimmer stoicism in the grip on his emotions were all that betrayed the battle which had raged in him between the two creative forces: s.e.x and intellect. He never pretended that the battle was won for keeps. The crust on which he walked he knew to be thin.

But it was won for the present. He well knew that there are no bargain days at life's counter: he had come there to purchase one of the most precious commodities--a creative career--and he was willing to pay the fee. If he found the fee somewhat high (and I have reason to know that he did) he never complained. It was his reward to enjoy that supreme luxury of conduct--to be the thing he seemed. He lived in that kind of gla.s.s house which is not damaged by any amount of stone-throwing, because there is nothing to hit: a gla.s.s house with all the curtains up. "Naked and unashamed" could have been written over the door of his mind. Time and again he quoted a pa.s.sage from _Trilby_ in which Du Maurier says that mental chast.i.ty begins in the artist when the model drops her last garment. He was frank to add that this was strictly true; that in the intense concentration of his mind on problems of form and color he had found in painting from the nude no room for images of s.e.x but on the contrary an actual release from the heats and fevers which plague young men. The remedy he proposed was: "Get rid of mystery."

There is a portrait painted at about this time which tells the story of the inner struggle which he was fighting and winning. It is of a young girl, about his own age, with a wondrously sweet expression and sparkling eyes. The delicacy, the spirituality which shines through it makes it hard to believe that the portrait could have been painted by a young man. Not a hint of s.e.xuality. He later told me that the girl was afflicted with a lameness and he told how grateful he was to her for valuing him for his mind and not obtruding s.e.x. I doubt if he knew how publicly yet with what delicacy he had thanked her.

There were moods of him, as when he stood silently drinking in a landscape, which made me think of that fine old chant which one hears in the churches:

"O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

In the emptiness left by his death I came to realize that one of the princ.i.p.al antic.i.p.ations of my life had been looking forward to watch, year by year, the unfolding of his mind and the ripening of his powers. His talent had long since pa.s.sed the stage at which it was a sporting proposition--the stage at which one could chaff him about cashing in heavily some day on a pair of "early Demmlers."

There was no kind of doubt that he carried within him the creative "daimon." His very instincts betrayed it. He went at a landscape the way Hugo Wolf went at a song: he lived with the poem before creating the music. For the first few days in a novel countryside he never thought of touching brush to canvas. He walked around in the scene, his every sense alert to its feature and color, to its sound and smell. He laid in wait for its moods. He eyed it in every circ.u.mstance of wind and weather, as if it had been a face he was preparing to paint, or a woman he was preparing to wed. No words. The quality he most appreciated in a companion at such times was silence. And it was entertainment enough to watch the play of expression in his face as his eyes roamed meadow, hill or sea horizon--vigilance, delight, eagerness, discriminating study, instructions to memory, brooding thought--his life was a perpetual honeymoon with nature for his bride.

Then would come the day and the hour when he was ready to paint. By that time, in the wealth of his materials, his only study would be not what to put in but what to leave out. I doubt if he had reached the point of knowingly causing his subconscious to work for him, but it will be apparent from the foregoing that he was doing so unconsciously.

He was able, somehow, to communicate his sense of form and color to another, without resort to speech, or with only the fewest words.

Perhaps it was the stimulus of seeing how much there was for him in the distant shining of sunlight on winding waters, or a range of low hills scrawling their signature on the chill blue of horizon sky, which taught others to find the wonder and dignity in what they would once have looked on as commonplace. At any rate, I find myself, in all seasons, seeing landscapes through his eyes.... "Now that looks commonplace, but it isn't. Fritz would have seen something in these somber March-brown meadows drowned in the freshets of spring; these red-budding birches; this delicate flush of pink in a drab evening sky...." And so he, being dead, yet seeth.

He was well aware, by this time, that the artist who is not also a thinker is a one-legged man. He accepted the obligation of understanding matters which, superficially, might have seemed far outside his province. It was in 1915 that he encountered Tolstoy's great work on Christian anarchism, _The Kingdom of G.o.d Is Within You_.

It revolutionized his view of life. It convinced him of the futility of violence as a method of settling disputes, personal or national.

And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his own right.

Next he encountered Romain Rolland's _Life of Michael Angelo_. Far from being chilled by the cla.s.sic austerity of that work, it warmed him. In it he found the food he had been seeking. He made it a part of him. It confirmed, with revelations of the laws of mental conduct which governed that giant of the Renaissance, principles which this young man had been formulating and practising by the naked instinct of his will to create. Things which he had been doing or forbearing to do, he could not have told you why, here received their sanction or veto in the experience of a genius.

Little as was said about this between us, it was easy to see how profoundly this discovery of the similarity between his own mental processes and those of a great master had strengthened his confidence in himself. Michael Angelo was added to the list of his Great Companions.

He had another. Rembrandt.

There was a gallery in London, which one I forget, which he visited day after day.

"In the first room you entered," said he, "was a portrait of an old woman by Rembrandt, painted in his last period. Time after time I went there intending to see the rest of the gallery. Sometimes I even tried a room or two. What was the use? I went back to that portrait. It seemed like a waste of time to look at the other pictures. Everything they said--if they said anything--was said in that portrait by Rembrandt and said better. It seemed to me as if the whole history of humanity were concentrated in that old woman's face.... Finally I surrendered and went only to see that."

There is a chast.i.ty of the mind, just as there is a chast.i.ty of the body. There are certain creative processes which a sincere thinker would no more reveal to casual eyes than he would strip in a public place. A rule of mental chast.i.ty: Do not hold promiscuous mental intercourse. The shallow would intrude into these austere places like picnickers in a sanctuary, littering it with their luncheon refuse.

Let the artist raise his thought-stained face from his toil, smiling but mute.

Fritz guarded his secrets well. A sudden flash of arrested eye, a certain silent intentness of gaze, an interest in a subject which would seem altogether out of proportion to its importance, a look of perpetual expectancy were all that betrayed his search. He was learning, learning, learning: every hour, every minute. Sometimes for days together he would seem dormant--practical people would have said loafing--lazily absorbing impressions as it had been through his pores. Again he seemed to devour scenery, faces, books, ideas with an appet.i.te that was insatiable.

A young sculptor, meeting Fritz, observed to me privately,

"What an unromantic exterior for an artist!"

The joke was too good to tell Fritz for, all innocently on the sculptor's part, it revealed a secret which I was not supposed to know: that Fritz instinctively cultivated this young-man-just-out-of-college-and-doing-well-in-business exterior as a high board fence behind which, free from intrusion, to train the muscles of his mind and cultivate the golden orchards of his soul.

He had to. For once he had mastered the tools of his trade there was absolutely no one to teach him the things he most needed to know. He must go it alone. He knew it. And he was going. That was the secret of the watchful, hungry look of him--the look of one aware of a ravenous appet.i.te and never sure of his next meal. That was the secret of his inarticulate grat.i.tude to anyone who happened to be able to put him in the way of finding the food his spirit craved. He discovered that the composers knew more about painting than most painters, and he used to turn up at Symphony concerts or at the opera with the look of a small boy fresh from a session with the jam pot behind the pantry door. He wasn't saying anything, but you knew that he'd got it. He made a bee-line for Beethoven and Wagner. He came away after a performance of _Tristan_ most divinely drunk on the strongest wine in music.

For the method of these composers was the method which he had chosen for himself unconsciously. He was not satisfied to write a thin melody. He was determined to teach his brush the rich and complicated instrumentation of an orchestral score. Not this face or that landscape was what he planned to put on canvas, but the abundance of life which he had absorbed through every avenue of sense. Not a violin alone, nothing less than the full orchestra would content him.

I ask myself whether I shall ever see anything more inspiriting than the quiet, secret quest of this young man for an excellence and a mastery not only unrecognized and unrewarded by the social order in which he lived, but not even comprehended. This is the courage of the creative mind: that it is prepared to meet alike its triumph or its defeat in an utter moral solitude. Stories of the physical courage which Fritz displayed on the field of battle were to come later....

Which is likely to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on earth more speedily--the courage of the body, to destroy; or the courage of the mind, to create?

Is all this too eulogistic? "Oh, come! He must have had faults, weaknesses, common spots." ... I suppose so. To tell the truth I never noticed them. There was a trait, as I first remember him, of too ready a.s.sent to the opinions of others which it amused me to attribute to peasant ancestry; but, after all, that conformity was only outward and it soon disappeared. In matters really vital to him his will was granite and he commanded a silence which could vociferate "Hands off!"

His very inarticulate tongue gave promise of greatness. One saw all this life-stuff entering into him. He could never express it in speech. It was a necessity of his being to express it somehow. It would have to come out on canvas.

Oh, once in a great while the curtain would be dropped. Some lucky turn of conversation would relax the inhibitions and liberate his tongue. Then for a few minutes, perhaps for an hour, one would be shown the treasure house within. What shall I say of those glimpses?

There are times to walk fearfully lest one smash something which cannot be replaced, and these occasions were of them. Treasures not of this world; possessions which honored the possessor by being held in honor; bins heaped, as it had been, with jewels and brocades; others which gaped with a sacrificial emptiness; s.p.a.ces eked out with the heroic poverty of one dedicated to the monasticism of a creative career.

Enough.... I saw--what I saw.

And withal he was half pagan. The physical gratification with which he drank in the beauty of the world reminded me of that statuette by _Roderick Hudson_, Dipsos ("Thirst")--a boy, feet planted wide apart, head thrown back, slaking his throat out of a gourd held in both hands. Fritz was that boy. The ugliness of modern clothes disgusted him. He was alert for chances to take off his own: impromptu baths in cold brooks on walking trips, or long days of summer sunshine on lonely stretches of sea beach with gleaming yellow sands. There was some place among the mountains of West Virginia where he used to go: ledges of flat rock above a rushing river. All day long they gathered warmth from the sun, retaining it well into the night. When the moon had risen he loved to steal away for a plunge in the river, then lie out naked in the moonlight on these great slabs of warm rock, alone with the magic night.

VIII

In May, 1917, he came to Boston from Pittsburgh. I was in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He came there.