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IMMORTAL YOUTH

A Study in the
Will to Create

Behold my most beautiful work:
the souls that 1 have sculptured.
These they cannot destroy. Let
the wood burn! The soul is mine.

— Romain Rolland : Colas Breugnon

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IMPRINTED MCMXIX

McGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS

GRAPHIC ARTS BUILDING

BOSTON

COPYRIGHT NINETEEN NINETEEN
LUCIEN PRICE

The first printing of this memoir is one thousand
copies. When these are gone, those who wish
more can obtain them from McGrath-Sherrill
Press, the publisher, Graphic Arts Building,
Boston, Massachusetts, for one dollar a copy.

IVD

IN the third act of Wagner's last musio-
drama there comes a flourish of muted
horns, remote, mysterious. In it sounds the
grandeur of that quest which never ends —
the quest of the Holy Grail. The phrase is
repeated, and over the flower-starred meadow
under the April sun of Good Friday morning
comes a knight in dark armor, his visor down,
carrying the holy spear. It is Parsifal. His
errand is the errand of aspiring youth in all
lands and all ages. I set that phrase of
music, compact with the poetry and pain of
idealism, at the beginning of these pages in
token of the spiritual brotherhood.

Q-S/T»,rv

Portrait of the artist by himself

IMMORTAL YOUTH

Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.

— Hamlet

I

THERE was a humble restaurant on Charles Street
where cabmen and chauffeurs could be induced
to tell the story of their lives over a combination-
supper of lamb chop and two fried eggs costing (that was
in 1912), with coffee and rolls, twenty-five cents. Across
the table one evening in the spring of that year sat a young
man about twenty-four years old. Anyone would have
taken a second look at him; also a third, a fourth, and as
many more as good manners would permit. What was there
about him that attracted attention? It was hard to say. The
dark eyes with a somber light burning in them? The rugged
features and swarthy complexion with a ruddy glow of
health in each jowl? The hands; very large and finely
muscled? (I have never seen a more beautiful pair of
hands on a human being.) It was all of these things and
none of them. Rather it was the look of one with immense
forces in reserve, bound on an errand.

Impossible to guess anything from his clothes: dark
suit, shirt of gray flannel, and black knitted tie. Chauffeur?
Hardly. Well then, what? Who?

(This is no isolated personal impression. Wherever he
went people felt the same intense curiosity about him.
Sometimes they stared at him so that he asked me if his
face was smudged.)

Was this stranger conversible? He was. Presently he was
speaking of the colonial doorways on Chestnut Street with
a discrimination which suggested the architect. No. It ap-

peared that he was studying under Mr. Tarbell at the
Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Next, that he came
from Pittsburgh. Here was a bond in common. As two
young Middle Westerners we resented the social cold
storage which New England imposes as a probationary
period of acquaintance. We condoled. We fraternized. We
were as neighbors meeting in a foreign land. At last some-
body with whom it was safe to scrape acquaintance in the
good old-fashioned Middle Western way without incurring
suspicion of designs on one another's souls, bodies, or
estates.

He climbed Beacon Hill with me to the house where I
lived, carrying a paper bag which, he explained modestly,
contained his breakfast: two bananas and a shredded
wheat biscuit.

The evening was mild. Windows stood open to the breeze
which rumpled the leaves of an old linden where it spread
its boughs in the brick-walled court.

He promptly took off his coat, displaying in the rays
of a green-shaded student lamp a pair of forearms worthy
of the hands which went with them. Summer and winter
he wore his sleeves rolled above his elbows. His wrists
resented cuffs as wild creatures resent cages. He stretched
out his long legs on a cot which did duty by the fireplace
as a sofa; pushed his hair off his forehead with both
hands, fingers interlocked, a trick he had ; and gave symp-
toms of feeling at home.

Was he talkative? Not much! Never did clam yield shell
to knife edge more gingerly. He would and he would not.
Shy, reserved, proud, devoured with ambition, savagely
determined, a prey to some misgivings, genuinely modest,
and anxious to talk it over with the right person, but by
no means sure who the right person was.

On sped the ambrosial hours of the spring evening. Bit
by bit he revealed himself. This was his third year in the
Museum School. He admired the technique of Mr. Tarbell

and Mr. Benson; he prized their instruction. But he dis-
trusted their smoothness. He missed vigor. All round him
he saw students neglecting their own creative bents to pro-
duce " little Bensons " and " little Tarbells." Already he
had resolved to quit Boston as soon as his student days

were over.

I don't say I shall ever be able to paint as well as
they can; but I must be myself, — not an imitation Tar-
bell."

There had been two years in Cornell before he came to
Boston. He had rowed in his class eight on Lake Cayuga.
Hence that physical self-respect which betokens the young
man accustomed unconcernedly to strip in a college boat-
house or gymnasium. But to eyes grown impatient with the
college athlete's all too customary intellectual torpor and
social complacency it was a holiday to find this well-made
body, tall, broad in the shoulder, narrow at hips, lean and
muscular, housing also the brain of the thinker and the
spirit of the pioneer.

For the astonishing thing was to find a young man of
this type studying to be a portrait painter instead of a
bond salesman. It didn't sound Yankee. I said so. That
shot rang the bell. He began to open up.

He was, it appeared, of German extraction. His grand-
father, who had wished to become an artist, had come to
America in a period when artists were about as much in
request among us as concert pianists on a cattle ranch. He
had earned his living as an architectural sculptor. The
talent plunged, like a river, underground for a generation ;
then reappeared. What happened when this little fellow's
fingers began to itch for the pencil was easy to guess. The
father and grandfather put their heads together and re-
solved that he should have his chance.

It began to unravel. Now one understood the earnest-
ness which seemed at first precocious — the seemingly cool
indifference to the call of the world, the flesh and the devil

which usually troubles youngsters of twenty-four. Here
was something more than ambition. Loyalty, affection,
gratitude, and family pride. This boy had more than talent.
He had character.

With this we are in the heart of the conflict between the
artist and the trader: between the will to create and the
will to possess. It is the central conflict of any age; es-
pecially of this, and especially in America. The young man
comes to the forks of the road where he must decide
whether he shall acquire or create; whether he shall be a
business man or a prophet. He finds himself in a society
which offers princely rewards to the commercial career
and little but pains and penalties to those who would
create. This youngster was just learning his way around
in the problem. He recited, with comical irony, the squalid
platitudes which are chewed out at a youth bold enough
to follow his creative bent:

' Is there any money in it?' ' Oh, of course, if you get
to be a great painter. But how do you know you've got it in
you to be a great painter? Think you have? Got a pretty
good opinion of yourself, haven't you?' ' What if you
fail? Suppose you wake up some morning and find your-
self a middle-aged man and a fizzle? Guess you'll wish
then that you'd stuck to plain everyday business and
dropped all this highfalutin about art.' 'Yes. I suppose
it's an easy life: sitting around and painting pictures.
Pretty soft, eh? Give me a man's job!' ' Don't you think it's
a little rash, my boy, to risk so much, when if you'd settle
down to a good business you'd be sure of a decent living?
And what about marriage? If you marry you'll have to
paint pot boilers, and then what becomes of your art? You
might as well be a business man and be done with it. And
if you don't, is it worth going without a wife and children

10

in order to paint pictures, and so come at last to a lonely
old age?' "

He knew all the old ones by heart. Later we used to
recite them together in concert like school children in the
geography class.

If you took the roof off any Chamber of Commerce you
would find half a dozen retired business men whose guilty
secret it is that they dabble on the quiet with paint tubes,
or modeling clay, or scenarios, or a violin — the poor,
damned souls of artists. They have made their ' ' pile."
House and lot, wife and children, motor car and country
club — all these they have; and yet, gnawing at their
hearts is the secret knowledge that they have missed the
big thing. They were born to beget children of the spirit;
they were born to create in art, in music, in literature, in
social experiment; and the ignoble standards of the society
in which they live have bludgeoned and ridiculed them
into prostituting their highest powers in the market-place.

In such relationship did this young man stand to the life
of his country and his time. With unflinching eye he list-
ened to its taunt:

'Artist, create at your peril! You may starve, for all
me, until you win a reputation that is a commercial asset.
After which, having despised you, I will do my best to
corrupt you by rewards and flatteries gratifying to my in-
tellectual snobbery."

Such were the terms. This youth, uncertain of his own
powers, accepted them with quiet courage and imperturb-
able good humor. Such was the secret of that look of
settled purpose so intriguing on a face so young, and such
the secret of the fire which smouldered behind those dark
eyes. He was prepared for a siege. He was ready to go to
the mat.

It had taken three generations — son, sire, and grand-
sire — to make this stand against the all-devouring maw
of American commercialism: three generations to conquer

11

and produce an artist. And mindful of his end I ask myself
whether they did conquer. We shall see.

Midnight clanked from the city clocks.

" Gosh!" said he, " is it as late as that?" He stood up
and knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the red bricks
of the hearth. " By the way, I don't know your name."

I told him.

" Mine," said he, " is Fred Demmler."

Explaining that I already had a friend named Fred I
asked if he had any objection to being called Fritz.

" None whatever."

" Fritz it is, then."

And Fritz it remained.

II

A once-aristocratic residential street now reduced to a
teaming thoroughfare; pedestal to Beacon Hill; narrow,
ill-paved, spattered with mud to the second story, double
row of tall brick town houses, where Thackeray and Dick-
ens were once guests, now placarding " rooms to let;" as-
sorted antique shops and restaurants, — "the long, un-
lovely street " of In Memoriam, yet with a certain wistful
charm in its decayed gentility: that is Charles Street.

Number 94 maintained its rubber plant on console-table
in dark vestibule. There was a contraption, usually out of
order, by which you pulled a bell five times to save your-
self the climb if the art colony in the fifth-floor-back did
not answer the ring. The young barbarians were usually
out.

It was a colony of three: Ralph Heard, small, slender,
fair, escaped from a western military academy of which
he could tell tales that froze the blood; Irving Sisson, a
tall, rangy Berkshire Yankee, dry and droll, an Artemus

12

Ward turned art student (though known as ' Siss ' it
would never have occurred to anyone to call him " Sissie,"
and if anyone had been so rash, Sisson's grim reply would
have been, like the man in the yarn, " Smile when you say
that"), and Fritz.

Their room was a first act stage-set for an Ameri«
can version of La Boheme. It was large, low-ceiled, and
had one of those sepulchral white marble mantel-pieces of
the black walnut period. There was an iron bed and a cot,
a gaslight always out of kilter, a writing-table strewn with
pipes, unanswered letters, tiny bottles of india ink, draw-
ing pens, crayons, thumb tacks, jars holding bouquets of
paint brushes, and scurrilous caricatures of one another
scrawled on scraps of white cardboard. The place reeked
with that heavenly odor of paint tubes. By the window was
a drawing board and portfolios. Canvases were stacked in
a dark corner, faces to the wall.

Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by
a triangle of tall brick houses, — the rears of houses on
Charles and Brimmer Streets, the fronts of three quaint
Italianate red-brick dwellings, — all enclosing a tiny
greensward on which slender poplars rustled their glossy
leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise the walls
and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and
on mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-
like voices of the choir boys over the melodious thunder
of great organ floated up to these windows. But I was never
able to observe that it produced any pietistic tone in num-
ber 94. On the contrary they affected to take a lively in-
terest in the upper windows of the houses opposite and
threatened to keep a pair of field glasses on their window
sill.

As you go down Pinckney Street to the river you pass a
break in the solid row of house fronts through which you
can look up and see the two windows of that fifth-floor-
back. One always did look, and if they were lighted, it was

13

impossible not to go up; for in that room there was always
some form of what is technically known as " trouble." I
never pass the spot now without looking up to see if there
is a light in those windows. . . . They are dark.

On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz;
student works. One was a small landscape sketch —
smouldering red of a sunset after rain, burning through
ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in violet
mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain
of thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its
sincerity. There was none of that striving after effect, that
ambitious rhetoric which youngsters usually mistake for
eloquence: no attempt to make the scene anything more
than what it was. The other was a portrait study of a work-
man naked to the waist. It was bold, vigorous, masculine,
and overflowing with the joy of bodily health.

So far so good. But something else was in store.

Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a
study of a woman's head in profile. One looked; and then
looked again. "Who was she? " She had come to the school
as a model for one week: that was all they knew. But her
secret was on this canvas. She must have been in her early
thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of a
place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life
has done its worst."

By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four
guessed a secret like that? From that moment it was clear
to me that he was a portrait painter.

' What," I asked, " is that little star in the lower corner
of the canvas? "

'That? Oh," he explained diffidently, "that is put on
pictures which the school saves for its exhibition."

14

Ill

That golden Spring! Clandestine dinners at an obscure
French cafe in an obscure court, where one went because,
though the food was something less than so-so, the sauces
were exotic; "clandestine" because, behind closed shut-
ters, they served vin ordinaire without a license. Our par-
ties, to the disgust of Jacques, were teetotal, the real at-
traction being that the joint might be pinched any minute.

On May afternoons in the Fenway, disguised in a base-
ball suit of gray flannel, Fritz rejoiced as a strong man to
swat the pill. The pill swatted him one day, broke his
thumb, and in the end he had to have it rebroken and reset
under ether. His first words on coming to were: "Give me
my paint box." All the nurses of his ward fell for him
with a loud crash. In all innocence he told what a lot of
extra trouble they went to for him. His friends smiled in
their sleeves.

As often as there was a play of Shaw or Ibsen or Gals-
worthy or Maeterlinck or Shakespeare or Synge there were
expeditions to peanut heaven. Knoblauch's Kismet hap-
pened along and Fritz appropriated the cry: "Alms! for
the love of Allah" for occasions choicely inappropriate.

When a fine May morning of blue and gold came wing-
ing over the city on the northwest wind he would get up
extra early, hustle through his shave and cold tubbing and
join me in the tramp over Beacon Hill, across the Common,
and down into Newspaper Row for breakfast at the cele-
brated Spa. On the way up Chestnut Street, where the
Brahmin pundits live, the favorite sport was to crack jokes
at the expense of the sources of income which sustained
these Georgian fronts and mahogany-and-brocade inte-
riors: here, a famous brand of ale; there, notorious indus-
trial nose-grinding in Fall River spinning mills — merry
clank of dividend skeleton in genteel closet ... On the
Common, jocund morning, fresh green of turf and tree,

15

sweet breath of the earth; sunshine, bird-song, youth, . . .
Spring!

And on a stool at the Spa, Fritz's provoking grin and sly
ba nter of a waitress who, after a good look at him, would
conclude that if she was being kidded she liked it and was
cheerfully ready for more. After which breakfast he
trudged the mile and a half to the Art Museum to see the
morning and to save his father carfares.

It appeared that he was a walker, and not afraid of rain.
He proved it. On a May evening brewing thunder we did a
dissolving view out of the city on a train for Cape Ann.
At the end of the shore road around the Cape awaited
lodgings at an inn and a midnight supper. At Gloucester he
was introduced to one of Wonson's clam chowders and we
set off at dusk.

That evening came the first inkling of his larger pur-
pose— his higher than personal ambition: what he would
paint after his portraits assured him a livelihood. Some-
thing was said about Pittsburgh and the mills.

'They ought to be painted," said he, "exactly as they
are. Not sentimentalized like the magazine covers; not
made romantic, as Joseph Pennell has made them; but
painted in all their horror. Some day. I don't know enough
yet."

Thunder had been muttering distantly. The night had
turned pitch black. There were sullen flashes, and drops
began to patter. Would he be for turning back? Not he!
Then the storm came crashing and pelting across the gran-
ite moors of the Cape. Gorgeous flashes which flushed the
winding tidal inlets and the rocky hills a brilliant rose
pink. Flash! Crash! Swish went the rain. And the harder it
stormed the better he liked it. He strode along intoxicated
with color and sound.

16

Near Annisquam is a double shade-row of willows over-
arching the road. Not far beyond, yellow lamplight was
streaming from the windows of a tiny cottage. Wading
knee-deep in wet grass we knocked.

Now it is a complicated process explaining to two aged
New England spinsters on a lonely road at nine o'clock of
a stormy night what your errand is, especially when you
haven't any. They listened; lifted the lamp on us for an
inspection — particularly on Fritz; one soon got used to
seeing people inspect him furtively — and invited us in.

"Walkin' round the Cape to Rockport, be ye? And in
the rain? For the fun of it! Well, come in and set down.
I'd like to get a good look at someone who'd walk to Rock-
port in the rain for the fun of it. Set down, young gentle-

men."

We set. They were sisters. One was small and timid:
she was of the sort that remain naive to the end. The other
was tall, angular and sardonic, with a mother wit smacking
of the soil and the salt water. She addressed herself to
Fritz:

'You ain't an escaped murderer, be ye?"

Fritz cackled lustily.

" How do you know I'm not?" said he.

" You look like that fella who's on trial in Boston now.
I see his pictures in the paper . . . and you come knockin'
on the door at dead o' night in a thunder squall like in a
story book."

'Would you say I looked like a murderer?" inquired
Fritz with relish.

' You might look worse 'n him," replied our free-speech
hostess. " By his pictures he's a good-lookin' fella. I says
to Saide whiles we was weedin' garden this morning, 't
wouldn't be safe to let him go now, for half the women
in New England are ready to fall in love with him — he's
been that advertised." She eyed us with her sardonic grin.
I looked at Fritz. He was blushing.

17

To her shrewd Yankee wits we were clearly two luna-
tics, but harmless; and the object was to extract as much
entertainment from us as the law allowed. Such was the
tone of her farewell, half an hour later.

" If anyone asks who was here," said she, " I'll tell them
it was two young fellas walkin' to Rockport in the rain for
the fun of it. — And then they'll think Vm one!"

Past midnight, stumping dog-tired into the inn; cold
meat and bread, ravenously devoured; bed, and the sleep
of the just.

. . . Morning; and such a morning as never was. Quite
forgetting to dress, Fritz lost himself staring out of the open
window at the quaint harbor, the fishing fleet, the blue bay
and the gaunt headlands until it was suggested to him that
passers by might be enjoying him as much as he was enjoy-
ing the morning.

There was an hour for soaking it in before the train left
for the city, and soak it in he did. A sea of pale blue, like
molten glass, untroubled by a breeze; sky the deep blue
of a morning after storms; air sweet with the scent of blos-
soming orchards and dooryard lilacs and tart with the tang
of salt brine; merry twitter of robins; lazy splash of surf;
the long headlands tapering down to the sea; the squat
white tower of Straitsmouth light solitary on its rocky
islet, " and overhead the lovely skies of May."

In the midst of it stood a young artist, dumb with de-
light. His eyes drank.

Oh brethren of the possessing class, ye who must own
this and that before you can enjoy, this world can never
give the bliss for which ye sigh. That pilgrimage cost less
than $3.00 per.

Evening. Above the tiny grass-plat and spindling poplars
in Mount Vernon Square floats the magic of a night in mid-
June. The windows of the fifth-floor-back in 94 Charles

18

are lighted and open to the breeze. From those of the Ad-
vent come gusts of music, — rumbles of organ and the fresh
voices of boys: choir rehearsal. But I think the sounds
which float down from the windows of 94 are more in tune
with the night: peal after peal of infectious laughter. It
was clear to the meanest order of intellect that Sisson was
telling stories which were more joyous than dutiful: also
that he had Fritz going. There was no mistaking that laugh.

A belated delivery man, basket on arm, pauses beside
me to listen and grin.

" I bet that was a good one," says he. " Say, but can't
that guy laugh!"

IV

In the autumn he reappeared bronzed and husky from a
summer on a Pennsylvania farm. That spring had been the
overture. Now the curtain rose. How can my thin piano
score reproduce that richly glowing orchestration?

Gradually the artist in him unfolded. It was like a
process of nature — slow, silent, sure. In speech he was
inarticulate. The spoken word was not his trade; he knew
it, and the knowledge made him self-conscious. But give
him a brush and he found tongue. His silences were formid-
able. "The better to eat you with, my dear!" Nothing es-
caped him. With a secret, fierce impetuosity he was storing
away impressions: glances, gestures, lines of faces, colors,
inflections of voices, landscapes, phrases, incidents, ideas:
he soaked them in like a thirsty sponge. Everything was
fish that came to his net. What sometimes looked like an
intellectual torpor was the boa constrictor digesting the
zebra whole. I doubt if he realized the tremendous vitality
of his creative instinct. He went about it as a wild creature
roams the forest for its food : it was a law of his being. On
tramping trips he would stalk miles in silence; stopping

19

stock still until he had taken in the scarlet-and-gold maple
grove in a purple autumn mist; or a mossy wood pile under
pines; or the rolling diversity of hill and woodland. No
apologies; no explanations. Business.

It was soon clear that this young man knew exactly what
he wanted and that he intended to get it. There was a kind
of animal sagacity about his mind which told it what food
to accept and what to reject.

" Kiinstler," says Goethe, " rede nicht. Bildel " (Artist,
don't talk. Create!) Fritz lived this precept. He would do
first, and then let the doing speak for itself. When a young
man is so determined to do something that he cannot be
got to talk about it, you may consider the thing as good
as done. Here was a hungry mind, seeking what it might
devour and devouring it. All that provender was being
assimilated. It could not evaporate in talk, for Fritz was
no talker. It had to be expressed somehow and that some-
how would have to be with a brush. . . . Oh, he came and
went disguised in the business suit of a young man dedi-
cated to the career of buying in the cheapest market and
selling in the dearest: pleasant, friendly, a prodigious
eater, a sound sleeper, invincibly healthy, — and with only
that silent intentness of eye to betray the secret of the
creative power he carried within him.

But that winter it was surprised out of him.

Fred Middleton, then twenty-seven years old, six years
out of Harvard College, thoroughly conversant with the
ethics of modern business, was preparing to de-class him-
self and earn an honest living by manual labor on the
land — a farmer, and not a "gentleman farmer." With
mock solemnity Fritz was commissioned to do a portrait
of Fred. The transaction was conducted on a basis of " free
agreement " which would have satisfied even Peter Kropot-
kin. The painter was to do it any way he chose — absolute
free speech. The sitter was to choose any clothes he liked,
to sit till he was tired, and stretch when he pleased. The

20

purchaser was to pay what he was able. So everybody was
happy, being free.

In the third floor back on Pinckney Street (it had north
light) decks were cleared for action: two rickety orange
boxes covered with a steamer rug did duty as a dais. With
paint box, easel and palette Fritz came down from Exeter
where he had just finished a portrait of an old lady.

There was a glowing fire in the grate; a bluster of March
winds in the brick court; the roar of blast through the
antlers of the old linden; waning light of Saturday and
Sunday afternoons; pages of Nietzsche's epigrams and of
Jean-Christophe read aloud; pauses to rest and consult.

Fritz always noticed people's hands. He found almost
as much character in them as in faces. He admired the
hands in Rodin's work, especially that of the sculptor in
his Pygmalion: — "the tenderness of that hand! " he said.
Fred's large hands interested him. The right one he caught
hot off the bat. The left caused him no end of trouble.
Finally one day he threw down his brush and exclaimed:

" I've watched that left hand come down to rest on that
leg a dozen times. I've tried everything else and now I'm
going to paint it exactly as it is. After all, it is a hand."

' Thank you; thank you!" replied Fred, bowing suavely.
' People usually refer to it as a ham. A photographer once
told me that I had a mitt like an elephant's hoof."

And Fritz painted. And the secret was out. It came out
in two installments: the first, when he was spreading on
canvas a life history of Fred Middleton compressed into
terms of a rugged face and two large hands; the second
came three years later. Fred had remarked, after one of
his sittings, that it was all he could do to keep his face
straight at some of the grimaces Fritz made while paint-

21

ing. The precaution was needless. If he had laughed out-
right it is doubtful if Fritz would have noticed it.

Most of the time while he was painting the portrait of
me, three years later, I was absorbed in my own work and
paid no attention to him. But one afternoon when my
wheels refused to grind I took a holiday and watched him
out of the tail of my eye . . .

It was as if some one you supposed you knew all about
had removed a set of false whiskers and spoken in his nat-
ural voice. Was this our shy, silent Fritz? Why, the impu-
dence of him ! The shameless way he peered into the secret
places of a face! "See here, young gentleman, who gave
you permission to rummage through that trunkful of old
letters?"

Here at last was Fritz, on his native heath, naked and
unashamed, talking his own language and, confident of its
not being understood, indulging in the most appalling
candor.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
While he pried into my secrets I pried into his. I amused
myself by painting a portrait of Fritz painting. Some day
I meant to show it to him . . . But here it is:

;' He may not be able to talk with his tongue. But give
him his brushes and his whole body talks. No gymnastics:
but his whole being aquiver. Silent, but his arms, fingers,
head, shoulders make animated dumb show. He is convers-
ing delightedly with himself over his work. He has forgot-
ten time and place. Intense mental concentration, and nerv-
ous energy. He squints, grimaces, stoops and looks at his
canvas wrong-side up. He sets his teeth, compresses lips,
squares his shoulders, — lost in his work. He mixes colors
with minute particularity. Sometimes he dabs with a tiny
brush, a peck here, a peck there, like a dainty bird. Again
he paints in sweeping flourishes, beating a kind of raptur-
ous rhythm with his brush, gesturing with it between
strokes, like an orchestral conductor hewing out the

22

rhythms of a symphony . . . He pauses; he hangs limp
over his palette, considering ... Or he gives a joyous
little bounce in his chair as the decision comes. His hands
and forearms, strong and supple, talk in every sinew.
Fingers mobile, infinitely expressive: they thumb the
brush; turn its handle in a ruminating pause; reflect a sud-
den resolution in the stiffening of tendons . . .

" And above all this quiet animation and silent dexterity
is the regnant, gallant head with dark eyes flashing mast-
ery; the mouth set with purpose; the thick mass of shining
black hair breaking into a wave as it falls away from the
clear forehead — and all in complete self-forgetfulness,
the oblivion of the artist rapt in the joy of creating."

It was quite simple. Here was a soul which dwelt in a
prison of shyness. Painting unlocked the door. Out it
rushed. Free. It could be itself at last. No fears; no con-
cealments. Liberty!

That was all very well for Fritz, but how about his sit-
ter? About the time the sitter sensed what was going on he
felt moved to exclaim:

"Just a moment, Fritz. Don't you think you are getting
a trifle familiar?"

I heard one of his painter friends, eyeing a canvas which
Fritz had just finished, mutter,

' There is some marvelous subtlety about that mind."

Already his knack of guessing people was damnable.
He played no favorites. " I am going to paint what I see
or I am not going to paint at all." If what he saw was
fatuous, he told it with the disconcerting gusto of a child;
if it was sad, he told it (as in that student portrait) so as
to produce a burning pressure behind the eyelids; if it was
strong and gentle, he told it (as in the portrait of the
young farmer) so as to kindle respect and affection. Often
all this was unconscious. Again he knew exactly what he
was doing and took a wicked relish in it. Of some wealthies
whom he was painting he confided with a grin:

23

" Of course they patronize me within an inch of my life,
but I sometimes wonder what would happen if they
knew . . ."

Perhaps he was not so unsophisticated as advertised in
the catalogue. He helped himself pretty generously out of
the popular supposition that an artist is a mild form of
lunatic. He made good use of his talent for silence. But
what ears and eyes! Nobody who had seen him paint could
ever feel quite safe with him again.

It happened that Alexander James was studying at the
Museum School. That the son of ''the psychologist who
made psychology read like a novel" and the nephew of
" the novelist who made a novel read like psychology "
should have identified Fritz's talent the first crack out of
the box was about the least surprising thing in the world.
The two young painters proceeded to form an offensive
and defensive alliance. Where one was, there was the other
also; on the baseball field, on painting expeditions, on pil-
grimages in early spring into New Hampshire to climb
Chocorua, and on occasional voyages into the land of
pretty girls. It was good to see the pair together: two thor-
oughbreds. Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other
fair, both about the same height and build. People would
turn to look after them as they passed with an expression
of " Wonder who they are. Somebody out of the ordinary."

Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration
of Fritz behind a smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would
suffer with an amused grin and the massive calm of a
mastiff, for he had no such arsenal of repartee as this
young gentleman from the household of a Harvard profes-
sor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as
to set Alexander spinning. It did not take the Cambridge

24

youth long to discover the use Fritz made of his talent for
silence and it was his delight to give him away in his game
of holding his tongue the better to use his eyes, — as Alex-
ander said: "the wise old Bruin!"

In Massachusetts the anniversary of the battle of Lex-
ington, April 19, is a holiday. It was 1913. In the parlor
of an inn whose windows look northward across the snug
haven of Rockport to the surf-scoured ledges of Pigeon
Cove I was seated at a piano, back to the door, painfully
dissecting a score of Tristan.

The door opened and a voice exclaimed, "Good Lord!"

It was Fritz. With him was Alexander James. Both were
half ossified with the chill of the mid-April afternoon, for
they had been painting on the shore down towards Straits-
mouth.

General astonishment. The two expeditions had origi-
nated quite independently. It was whimsically like those
momentous chance encounters in picturesque spots which
abound in the novels of Alexander's uncle Henry; but the
novelist, be it noted, doesn't always save these coincidences
from a slightly fishy sound which was totally wanting in
this.

They thawed themselves out and exhibited their sketches.
Fritz had, as usual, gone after it and got it — a spirited
bit: druidical heaps of pink granite boulders against dash-
ing surf: dazzling white of foam-crest on deep blue.

There was a jolly supper in the brown-walled dining
room (it had been the kitchen of an eighteenth century
farm house) which the last rays of the spring sun flooded
with red golden light; the two painters comparing notes
on the exhibitions of the Scandinavians and the Ten
Americans.

They departed for a home-talent play at a local hall in
a frame of mind which boded no good for the perform-
ance. . . . About eleven o'clock they breezed in with the

25

announcement that there was a Northwest wind (the New
England wind which sweeps the sky cloudless blue), a full
moon and a dashing sea ; and that to go to bed was a crime.
Away, then, for Land's End, along shore paths at the edge
of grassy cliffs, by bushy lanes, over meadows, moors,
popple beaches and brooks, across the moon-blanched land
beside the moon-burnished sea. Straitsmouth Light burned
a yellow spark. The twin lights on Thatcher's Island shone
weird blue in their tall towers. Low on the rim of sky and
sea hung gigantic masses of cloud whitened by the bluish
pallor of the moon. In the marsh bottoms frogs cheeped
their shrill sweet song of spring: the northwester bellowed
through the willow twigs . . . mournful pour of surf
. . . splendor of spring moon . . . the lonely moor . . .
the steadfast light-house flames . . . the white walls and
gray roofs of the sleeping town . . .

At one in the morning, tip-toeing into the dining room,
we devoured a plate of bread and butter left for late
comers. Both of them were too genuine artists to comment
on what we had seen.

It is a lovely afternoon of June, 1914, at the pier of the
Allan Line steamships in Charlestown. The ship is the old
Nubian, safe and slow, saloon upholstered in plush of
maple sugar brown, brass oil lamps swinging in gimbles
as befitted a smart packet of the late 80's. Boston to
Glasgow. Scotland swarmed the wharf.

Mixed in was an artists' colony. For that was the great
day. Fritz and Alexander were sailing for a year's study
abroad: London, Paris, Munich. The gang which came to
see them off were dramatis personae of Act II of La
Boheme: four painters, an interior decorator, an illustra-
trator, assorted scribblers, and a Scottish chieftain (lord

26

of an ancient clan, hero of a hundred skin-of-your-teeth
escapes, veteran of Polish revolutionary escapades, un-
crowned king of an African tribe: as raconteur he had his
rival, Robert Louis Stevenson, lashed to the bed). This
day he strode resplendent in plaid knee socks, plaid kilt,
a murderous Hieland dirk swung at his hip, short jacket
the breast of which blazed with medals, and long black
locks caught up under a cap. As he crossed the wharf
planking at a stride like deer-stalking over his native
crags, the rest of us half expected the assembled Scots to
prostrate themselves and knock foreheads on flooring in
fealty. He did excite some attention. Sisson said — well,
no matter what Sisson said.*

It was a great occasion. Fritz, his black eyes snapping
with excitement, came up the gang plank from deck to
wharf to be pounced on by a jolly crew. He was outwardly
cool, but his engines were racing. After him came Alex-
ander James. Pounce number two. Showers of rice clat-
tered on a bridal pair close by, but their festival was tame
compared to this. To meet Henry James and John Sargent
in London: to study in Paris and Munich: to see the great
galleries. They were embarking on greater seas than the
Atlantic. This was the great day, the great hour, and with a
troop of friends rejoicing in their good fortune to sweeten
it . . . Away to the land of heart's desire . . . Romance
. . . Bohemia . . . Europe.

" 0 Youth, and the days that were! "

From the caplog at the pier head as the Nubian swung
into midstream of the Charles, the band of pariahs bawled
ribald farewells and wrung out handkerchiefs in mock

* After all, why not ? Some one was explaining that the chief (who
was a genuinely fine fellow) had come to America to raise funds for his
clan. Sisson said : " He'll be lucky if he gets back to Scotland with his
kilt."

27

tears. Alexander James, the Clive Newcome of the ad-
venture, leaned on the teakwood rail, waving his straw
hat; and Fritz, the "J. J." of the story, sat on the lowest
ratline of the shrouds, feet on rail, pretending to weep into
his hat and then emptying the brine into the brine.

The ship's side, black hull and white upperworks, took
a burnishing from the late afternoon sun. Under the gaiety
there was a queer feeling. There, divided from us by a
hundred yards of harbor water, were the two friends with
whom we had just shaken hands, and the strip between
was widening, would widen to an ocean. They stood out
amid the throng of passengers as distinct as though they
had been the only souls aboard. They waved: we waved.
As the vessel straightened away in her course they imi-
tated our several gestures to signify personal farewells:
it was thought and done impromptu. And long after their
figures grew indistinct as the ship lessened down the harbor
lane between elbowing wharves and the piled masses of
city towers and spires, there were gleams of two white
straw hats which we knew . . .

All the same, it was a trifle too much like a dress re-
hearsal for death.

Then, in less than six weeks, a world in tumult. Con-
tinental ateliers were emptying their students on the battle-
field. Fritz, who was in England, prudently kept out of
the rush homeward and made the most of his few weeks.

He was in Downing Street in front of that dingy Geor-
gian fagade the night the British Cabinet sat waiting for
Germany's reply to their ultimatum.

"' It gave one an odd feeling," said he, " to realize that
behind those drawn shades sat men who were settling
the question of life or death for hundreds of thousands

28

of their fellow creatures. The crowd cheered. I did not."
Of Henry James he saw comparatively little, for the
novelist was in poor health, but he was immensely stimu-
lated by the little he did see, for beginning with Roderick
Hudson he had been quick to discover how much this mas-
ter of style had to teach a painter of what he had himself
learned from painters.

There was a memorable session with Mr. Sargent in his
London studio. Mr. Sargent happened just then to be doing
a portrait of Lord Curzon, and Fritz related with wicked
glee (imitating Mr. Sargent as he backed away from his
easel) how the painter had remarked:

" I have not made up my mind how to finish it. If I can't
get enough interest out of the face, I'll put a scarlet coat
on him.

It was late in October before he sailed for home, as one
of a handful of passengers on a freighter. The voyage was
one of continuous foul weather which, to the mystification
of the others, was vastly to the delight of Fritz. He lived
on deck, begrudging time to sleep. He fraternized with the
crew. One day of thin drizzle and greasy swells, getting
into old togs, he helped the deck-hands greatly to their
satisfaction and somewhat to the scandal of the other
passengers, shovel coal down a hatch.

"They didn't think I'd stick it through," said he.
• After that he was one of them.

VI

He had chosen to live in Pittsburgh, partly because it
was his home and partly because it promised him more
elbow room.

" I want to paint," said he, " and I do not want to have
to play social politics in order to get commissions, as I

29

am afraid I would have to do in Boston. Besides, in Pitts-
burgh, there are fewer painters to influence me. I stand
more chance of being myself."

Alexander James said it was brutal of Fritz to go away
to Pittsburgh. The rest of the colony agreed. But it became
Fritz's delight to swoop down on us in Boston unannounced.

... It is late in a wild night of mid-winter, a furious
gale of wind and snow whipping across the gables and
chimney stacks of Beacon Hill: a night for tucking oneself
up in a wing chair beside a fire with a book and reading
lamp, roar of storm in ears. . .

A rap sounds on the door.

"Come!"

The rap is repeated.

"Come in!"

The door opens and framed in its blackness stands
Fritz.

With him is Ralph Heard in a state of jubilation.

" You remember," says he, " I told you only two days
ago that I sort of had a hunch that Fritz might be dropping
in on us most any time now? Well, to-night I was sitting
at my writing-table, when the door opened with a bang.
I thought, without looking around, 'That is the way Fritz
opens a door.' And there was Fritz."

His one emotional luxury was this enjoyment of watch-
ing his friends fall all over their own feet in the glad
surprise of seeing him.

He was on his way to paint some portraits of Exeter
schoolmasters. It was slowly wormed out of him that
romance had visited his shores. A St. Louis woman was
motoring to New York. In a street of Pittsburgh a tire blew
out. As it was raining, she got out of the car and went into
an art store in front of which it had stopped, to wait for
repairs. Her errand in New York was to choose a portrait
painter. In the art store a portrait by Fritz was on exhibi-
tion. She decided that there was no need of going on to

30

New York. That evening Fritz was called to her hotel. It
ended by his going on to St. Louis and painting portraits
of the whole family.

What his bread-and-butter problems were I never fully
knew. I think they were more in what he faced than in
what he had to encounter. Within two or three years after
he left the Museum School, he was paying his own way.
He lived with the utmost frugality. His studio was a work-
shop: four walls and a north light.

" I keep it bare on purpose," he confided, " to frighten
away loafers."

It appeared that certain amiable slayers of their own
and others' time, envisaging a studio of divans, Russian
cigarettes, tea and twaddle, paid one visit, and only one.

His attitude toward money was an island of sanity in a
lunatic ocean. It was no time before he sensed the absurd-
ity of attempting to measure creative work by commercial
values, and that is, of course, the avenue by which the
artist-thinker divines the idiotic husbandry of organizing
society to batten those who distribute and those who own
by penalizing those who produce and those who create.
Money he viewed as an article neither to be spent nor to
be hoarded, but rather to be reinvested where it would draw
intellectual dividends. His one extravagance was to buy
his mind the food it needed if he had the wherewithal to
pay for it. "And," as Erasmus remarks, " after that, some
clothes." The same independence which had fortified him
against those who had once pointed him out as a crack-
brained youngster with the presumption to suppose he
could be a great artist sustained him now when he was
pointed out as a promising portrait painter who was al-
ready " getting good money for his work."

Finding himself, as he did, endowed with a creative
purpose considerably at odds with the structure of the
society around him; put to it, as he. was, to protect that
fledgling from the well-intentioned but fatal meddlings of

31

the mediocre, not a shadow of ill-humor did he allow to
cross his average human intercourse. He made me think
of a wise old cat who, having carefully hidden her kittens
in the hayloft, presents a tolerant frame to the cuffs and
caresses of the children.

By the beginning of 1916 it was clear to anyone who
knew him that all he needed to reach the summit was to
keep climbing, and this he appeared abundantly able and
determined to do.

VII

He was growing up. Shy he would always be, but in place
of his boyish self-distrust had come a quiet confidence in
his own powers. His mind was on the watch for its food,
like an eagle ready to pounce. There was an eager, vigilant
look in his eyes when one spoke of certain books unknown
to him : he was questioning whether they would be what he
wanted. He would pump me about the content of certain
authors. I could see him accepting and rejecting. He read
the poets as one quarrying marble for architectural designs
of his own. His hungry reading was as different from that
of the perfunctory college student as the oarsmanship of
a dory fisherman on the Grand Banks is from that of an
eight-oared crew on the placid Charles: the producer as
contrasted with the consumer.

George Meredith and Walt Whitman became two of
his great companions. Once he told me that he was reading
everything of Thomas Hardy he could lay his hands on.

"Why?" I asked.

" He knows how to set the human figure against vast
backgrounds of Nature: figures outlined half against a
heath and half against sky."

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 Christopbe

32

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 nobler 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 ad-
journed to a performance of Man and Superman. Fritz
kept his room-mate up until two in the morning discussing

33

it. The next night he routed me out of hed at ten and
quizzed me about it until three in the morning.

He had had his glimpse of the collision between sex 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 trans-
parent. 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 sex 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 assumes the responsibility of wife
and children he also assumes the risk of shackling himself
to pot-boiling work for life.

Society also decrees a standard of prenuptial chastity
for the male. Suppose the male happens to be more inter-
ested 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:
sex and intellect. He never pretended that the battle was

34

i

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 glass house which is
not damaged by any amount of stone-throwing, because
there is nothing to hit: a glass 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
passage from Trilby in which Du Maurier says that mental
chastity 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 sex 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 del-
icacy, 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 sexuality. 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 sex. 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:

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

35

In the emptiness left by his death I came to realize that
one of the principal anticipations 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 passed the stage at which it was a sporting propo-
sition — the stage at which one could chaff him about cash-
ing 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 circum-
stance 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 com-
panion at such times was silence. And it was entertain-
ment enough to watch the play of expression in his face
as his eyes roamed meadow, hill or sea horizon — vig-
ilance, delight, eagerness, discriminating study, instruc-
tions to memory, brooding thought — his life was a per-
petual 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 uncon-
sciously.

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

36

the fewest words. Perhaps it was the stimulus of seeing
how much there was for him in the distant shining of sun-
light 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 God Is Within You. It revo-
lutionized 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 ac-
cepted 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 classic 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 in-
stinct 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 be-

37

tween 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 por-
trait 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. Every-
thing 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 chastity of the mind, just as there is a chastity
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 chastity:
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 ar-
rested 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, learn-
ing: every hour, every minute. Sometimes for days together

38

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 appetite that was insatiable.

A young sculptor, meeting Fritz, observed to me pri-
vately,

'What an unromantic exterior for an artist!"

The joke was too good to tell Fritz for, all inno-
cently on the sculptor's part, it revealed a secret which
I was not supposed to know: that Fritz instinctively cul-
tivated 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
appetite and never sure of his next meal. That was the
secret of his inarticulate gratitude 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 satis-
fied to write a thin melody. He was determined to teach his
brush the rich and complicated instrumentation of an or-
chestral score. Not this face or that landscape was what he
planned to put on canvas, but the abundance of life which

39

he had absorbed through every avenue of sense. Not a
violin alone, nothing less than the full orchestra would con-
tent him.

I ask myself whether I shall ever see anything more in-
spiriting 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 assent to the opinions
of others which it amused me to attribute to peasant an-
cestry; 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 inhibi-
tions and liberate his tongue. Then for a few minutes, per-
haps 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

40

the possessor by being held in honor; bins heaped, as it
had been, with jewels and brocades; others which gaped
with a sacrificial emptiness; spaces 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 gratifica-
tion with which he drank in the beauty of the world re-
minded me of that statuette by Roderick Hudson, Al^os
("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 dis-
gusted 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 moon-
light 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.

Conscription impended. Under his composure the strug-
gle was going on. Tolstoy had converted him. What was he
to do?

41

i

"If there were no one but myself to consider . . . ,"
said he, " But the suffering which you would have no hesi-
tation in imposing on yourself you hesitate to impose on
those dearer to you than yourself."

He was thrilled by the nonresistance of the still-young
Russian revolution:

"Wonderful people, liberated by their refusal to kill!
They fold their arms and say ' Shoot!' The Cossacks refuse
to shoot them. And a despotism, centuries old, comes
tumbling down. It proves everything that Tolstoy has said."

For three days, tramping about the scrubby country-
side, rambling along the banks of the Ohio, rowing up the
swift, muddy current of the Kanawah, the dilemma of a
man born to create and commandeered to destroy was
threshed out. Never before had he spoken so freely. The
economic causes of the trouble he understood fairly well,
but it was startling with what a seeing eye he pierced the
illusions which beset that time. By that faculty of divina-
tion peculiar to the artist's mind he reached, at one leap,
conclusions which the thinker only arrives at after labori-
ous effort. And he was a young man without an illusion
left, steadfastly looking the ugliest facts of our social order
in the face.

On the last evening of his stay we were standing on the
steel spider web of a suspension bridge which spans the
Ohio, watching a sunset unfurl its banners of blood and
fire.

All day there had been thunder and rain, and eastward
behind the towers and spires of the city skyline still hung
the retreating clouds, sullen and dark. Fritz pointed to
where, against that gloomy cloud bank, high above the
city and gilded red from the setting sun, rose two symbols:
one on the tip of a spire, the other on the staff atop a tower:
cross and flag.

" Church," said he grimly, " and State."

42

The next day he returned to Pittsburgh to register for
the draft.

July found me back in New England at a farm on the
banks of the Merrimac in West Newbury. Returning one
noon from an errand up the hills to the village I was hailed
by the children with a shout:

"A friend of yours is here."

"Who is he?"

" He told us his name but we've forgotten it."

"What does he look like?"

Descriptions varied:

" He's awfully strong," said the boy.

"He has shiny black hair and black eyes," said the
littlest girl.

" He wears his coat off and his sleeves rolled up," said
the biggest little girl, and she added, with the spontaneous
poetry of childhood, "And his hands are beeootiful!"

"Where is he?"

" Down by the river."

Under the maples, lying in the tall grass at the foot of a
steep bank which sloped to the stream, with children
clambering all over him, was Fritz. He scrambled to his
feet and came forward putting out his hand with that
awkwardness of meeting after an absence which he never
quite outgrew, but his eyes snapped with enjoyment at my
astonishment.

It appeared that he had been painting some one in
a Massachusetts mill city and had dashed up here between-
whiles.

There is a tiny hut perched like a brown owl on a knoll
in a grove of hickories beside the river. To this hermitage
we retired and he related the news of the intellectual

43

underworld in Pittsburgh. Roger Baldwin had been there,
much to his comfort. A friend whose portrait he had been
painting, aware that the mildest radicalism had now be-
come high treason, had remarked by way of chaffing him,
" I hope they give you a cell with a north light."
He unburdened with a tone of sheer physical relief:
" This frantic enthusiasm for ' democracy,' ' said he,
"on the part of people who have spent their whole lives
combating it!"

He sat relaxed in a deep chair, hands hanging limp on
its arms — hands large, strongly muscled, marked with
heavy veins, the fingers full-fleshed at their tips, the skin
bronzed by the sun.

Tatters of sunlight, reflected from the wavelets of the
river obliquely up underneath the hickory boughs, flickered
on the ceiling and walls of the hut.

Disillusioned he was, but not cynical. His humor was a
bath to a sore spirit. He kindled, in the moral solitude of
that hour, a little fire of faith and hope. It struck me anew,
eyeing him as he sat there, what a beautiful creature he
was, inside and out.

There was in him, too, an odd streak of stoicism. Keen
as he was for " the eats," he delighted in little acts of self-
discipline. That afternoon, it being necessary for me to try
for a nap, he cleared out to gather views of river and
woods. An hour later I discovered this young Spartan,
hands clasped behind head, spine stretched along the plank
flooring of the narrow ledge in front of the hut, sleeping
quietly. . . .

The next day he made himself everlastingly solid with
the people at the farm by spending the whole morning fit-
ting screens to the multitudinous doors and windows of
their ark of a house. Everyone wanted Fritz to stay a
month.

At nine that evening he left. As we trudged over the

44

road in the warm darkness of the summer night, he talked
soberly of the dubious future.

He was not called until the following April, 1918. Twice
that winter he came to Boston. Number 94 Charles Street
had been dismantled. But the third-floor-back on Pinckney
Street received him with an extra cot for bivouac.

. . . This should have been the longest chapter of all,
and the best. I find that I cannot write it.

»»

Only a postscript. I asked him for a picture of himself.
' What do you want," he inquired, " a painting?"

My ideas had been far more modest:
' Beggars should not be choosers. I will take what I can
get: painting, photograph, snap-shot: and be thankful."

"What size would you like?"

" Small enough so that it can go wherever I go.

He made no promises. His way was to wait until the
time came and then let the performance speak.

Not three weeks later it came : a sketch in oils, head and
shoulders, ten inches by twelve, not at all the cold greenish
grays I had anticipated from his habitual attitude of self-
effacement, but on the contrary a scheme of rich golden
browns. He has painted his own portrait with the same
reticence which looks out of its eyes. Strangers seeing it
remark,

"What a striking face!"

His friends view it and say,

"He was much finer looking than that."

45

IX

The rest is seen dimly, as through a mist. His voice is
heard, distinct and clear, but as from a great distance.

To Ralph Heard he writes from Camp Lee, Virginia:

;' I am eating, sleeping, and drilling with physical
enthusiasm," and later, "Tell the fellows that the dust is
gathering on my palette."

A letter to me in May tells of taking his pipe at the day's
end and strolling into the woods of the camp to be alone
with the song of birds and tints of sunset. Late in July
came a letter from France describing a march "between
gleam of gold in the west and a rising full moon in the
east, . . . aeroplanes in action overhead and cannonading
over the hills to the east." Then occurs this:

14 I am little different from as you know me, even
though now in a machine gun company: — Curious
irony. —

And this:

" Continue your work . . . Other victories are tran-
sient."

And this was his farewell:

"We have seen great visions and dreamed splendid
dreams. And the faith you have in me, — which I prize
so desperately, — I have in you, no matter where each of
us may be headed. We will live the best we can — that,
through our friendship, is all we ask of each other."

On January 23, 1919, one of his brothers writes from
Le Mans, France:

" St. Remis du Plain is the name of the little town where
Fred's company was billeted. It is perched on the top of a
hill in the middle of a vast plain and was visible for a long
time as I headed towards it. This was the trip I had planned

46

long ago, and pictured a happy meeting; however, it was
decreed otherwise. Passing up the narrow street I saw
'Headquarters, 136 M. G. Bn.' written on the door of an
old stone house. The orderly room was full of officers. I
inquired for Lieut. Rew, the one who had previously writ-
ten to me, and introduced myself as Fred's brother. The
officer who was dictating stopped work, came over and
shook hands with me. The captain commanding the bat-
talion came from behind the table, greeted me and offered
a word of sympathy. Soon all the officers were grouped
about me and I saw that Fred was considered one of their
number. The captain said, ' He was the best sergeant I
ever had.' They invited me to mess with them, and Lieut.
Rew said I was to bunk with him, ' for my men have
cooties,' but I saw this was all done so that they might
have a chance to speak of Fred. One of the sergeants told
me that when the news came, the officers were even more
broken up about it than the men.

" I was introduced to the noncoms with whom Fred
seems to have been a favorite. In the evening, as we sat
around an open fireplace, I asked if Fred had had a
' buddy.' The sergeant with whom Fred used to sleep said,
' No. He was everybody's friend.'

" As I was walking up to the kitchen, a private stepped
out of the mess line and came up to me saying he knew
me through my resemblance to Fred. Soon the mess line
was demoralized and I was the center of a lively mass all
talking at once and I could easily see why the captain rec-
ommended him so highly as a sergeant. — ' He never said
a harsh word,' — ' He was always cheerful and never
kicked,' — 'When we complained about the feed or any-
thing, he said it would be better later.' They talked so long
that at last the cook asked me if I would not please eat so
that they would eat and let him get through.

"The division left Camp Lee, June 21, 1918, and sailed

47

from Newport News on the Italian transport Caserta. It
was a dirty boat, the feed rotten, and the trip rough. Every-
body was disgusted. Fred was about the only one of the
company who never missed a meal. A private told me that
he and Fred were standing at the rail in the bow of the
ship one night talking about a number of things. This fel-
low voiced the sentiment of most of the company when he
said he only wanted to make one more ocean trip and that
was in the reverse direction. Fred looked far out across
the water and remarked : ' I could stand a few more.'

"They landed at Brest on July 5 and entrained at once
for Souville. They used the French type of compartment
cars where with ten men and full equipment there wasn't
much room to move about. Fred was in charge of his com-
partment and, with his usual ingenuity, devised means of
disposing of the equipment to best advantage for their
comfort. He also carefully arranged the daily menu con-
sisting of bread, corned beef, tomatoes, beans, and jam.
He did all this in such a serio-comic way that the fellows
are still laughing over the memories of the trip.

;' On September 20 the division led the drive into the
Argonne forest. This is reputed to have been the hardest
battle of the war in respect to the Germans' shell fire and
the suffering caused by the rainy weather and lack of
shelter. Through it all there was not a healthier nor more
cheerful man than Fred. Recognized by the commanding
officer as having 'the coolest head in the company and
afraid of nothing ' he was made a sergeant after this battle
over the heads of some old National Guardsmen ; but there
was not a murmur — all were satisfied. When they came
out of the woods he helped the doctor with the wounded
(he seems to have helped everywhere, from the kitchen
to the captain's private office). After they had all been at-
tended to, he asked the doctor to look him over. He had
received three flesh wounds in shoulder and arm. He picked
out the pieces of shrapnel himself and had the doctor

48

bandage him. After which he went about his work as usual.
" October 10 found the company in the St. Mihiel sec-
tor, and on October 22 it moved into Belgium. All this
meant miles of weary hiking under a full pack; but Fred
remained the same cheerful fellow as ever. He amused the
whole company with his doings. He found an old hair-
clipper among some salvage and immediately opened a
barber shop where lieutenants as well as privates got their
hair cut. Another thing that I recognized as characteristic
were the remarks pertaining to his appetite. He never lost
it. He was known to have 'eats' on his person all the
time. He had a special knack of hunting out farm houses,
engaging madame in conversation, and coming away with
bread, eggs, or cheese in his knapsack. Occasionally he
did some sketching and his letters were a joy to the lieuten-
ant who censored them because of the excellent descrip-
tions they contained . . .

'The company went over the top early in the morning
of October 31. Fred was wounded in the left side by a
piece of high explosive shell at about 5:30 a.m. It was
before daylight and few knew he had been hit. When they
did hear it, they were far in advance and Fred had been
carried to Evacuation Hospital Number Five, at Staden,
Belgium. He died there on November 2. One of the boys
who helped carry him to the rear says that he was fully
conscious despite the serious nature of his wound, and tells
of how he directed them what to do — how he told them
to leave him when the shells fell too fast (which they
wouldn't do) — of how they left him, quite himself, at the
first-aid station . . .

14 He was never referred to as a bully or even as a
fighter — he was spared the grewsome experience of hand-
to-hand fighting, for from the first the Germans were in
full flight; but he was remembered for his cheerfulness,
his kindness toward others and especially for his lack of
harsh words. His favorite text from the Bible was that

49

part of the Sermon on the Mount known as the beatitudes,
and he often wondered why ministers did not preach on it
more. He constantly spoke of this to the men. (The italics
are not in the original.)

" His fire has gone out, but he left a glow in the hearts
of these men which will never go out."

And now it is time that a few questions be asked, simple
and direct. It is due him. ,--~-~— ^-^ -s—--^l_ '

Why is it that when he set himself to create he

id to

contend against that dead-weight of indifference if not
the active hostility of organized society recorded in these
pages; but when he was commandeered to destroy, that
society clothed him, fed him, sheltered him, trained him,
(transported him, paid him, nursed him, and buried him?

It is well that we should know what has been squand-
ered. He that might have ennobled generations of men
with his great visions and his splendid dreams is mingling
his clay with the soil of Belgium. He had the seeds of
genius. Capitalism made him a machine gunner.

Is this the best we can find for our artists to do? Is it
any wonder that the creative minds of to-day are finding
themselves driven to social revolution as their art-form?

In the brown-owl hut beside the Merrimac that summer
day in 1917 he remarked in a tone of indulgent irony:

'The 'military experts' have found a nice, polite term
for men killed or too badly maimed to fight any more."

"What is it?" I asked.

" ' Wastage.' "

50

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51

VISITATION

Here, at the end, let those measures of the Ninth Sym-
phony sound: no dirge; but a paean of joy. For in that
choral ecstasy of Beethoven's hymn to human brotherhood
speaks the whole meaning and purpose of the life that was.

Why have I detained you for a tale so plain? What was
he but an obscure young painter, thirty years old, with
his way to make? Why should I point him out to you
among the millions? Because he was my friend? No.
Because he is yours. Because I thought I saw in him the
seeds of greatness? No. Because the seeds of greatness
which were in him are in you; and he shall make you see
them.

I give him to you young men to be your friend, loyal
and high-minded. I give him to you young women to be
your lover, clean of body and of soul. He will be worthy
of your friendship and of your love, and you shall be
worthy of his in return.

I give him to you in all the beauty of his youth and he
shall never grow old, but he shall himself become one of
the heroic friends, one of the great companions. I give you
his soul to carry in your own, a life within a life. Through
his eyes you may see the wonder and glory of the beautiful
world which he saw so joyously. Let his generous heart
beat through yours his passion for an ideal society and a
better time than ours.

He is to be immortal. And it is you who must make him
so. Let him kindle in your hearts a fire which will not go
out. He that would have made great canvases glow with
the might of his spirit and the splendor of his imagination
shall not now live by art alone, but by the living deeds
of you. You shall be his masterpieces. You, immortal
youth, shall be his immortality.

53

Away from the dust and heat of the day, when the loud
world crowds and clamors, he shall make for you, all in a
dim, cool chamber of your souls, a sanctuary — a little
space of sacred friendship — where you may enter and,
closing the door, renew your vows.

You may have him to stand beside you in hours of tri-
umph, and in hours of disaster; steadier of your aim, sus-
tainer of your courage.

Sit in the twilight with folded hands and he shall speak
to you. When moonbeams pour their silent music into your
chamber at dead of night and your sight rejoices in them,
it is he. Hearken to the beat of surf along a lonely shore;
to the song of the hermit thrush in dense thickets; to the
whisper of the night wind among the leaves: "It is he!"
Kindle to the charm and mystery of a face in the crowd,
and "It is he!" Thrill at the return of many-blossomed
spring, at the strength of men, at the grace of women, and
your joy shall be his joy. In every visitation to you of
the truth that not by hate, not by blows, but only by the
love of the human heart can the world be won from its
evil, he shall live, he shall live again. And the color and
rhythm of life, the joy of begetting which he never knew,
the joy of creating which he knew so abundantly, when it
is yours shall be his also. And so all that is highest and
best in you, all that inspired him and that he inspired,
shall be the works of art by which he is remembered.

Immortal youth, let him be comrade and friend to you
as he was to me; let him live forever in your young hearts,
himself forever young, bathed in the glory of eternal dawn.

THE LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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