Читать книгу: «The Bay State Monthly. Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1884», страница 4

Mr. Henry E. Brown has always since the war been intensely interested in the colored men of the South. Shortly after graduation at Oberlin College, Ohio, he founded, and was for two years president of, a college for colored men in Alabama. He is now secretary for the committee among this class at the South, and speaks most encouragingly of the future of this work.

In 1877, there was graduated a young man named L.D. Wishard, from Princeton College. To him seems to have been given a great desire for an inter-collegiate religious work. He, with his companions, issued a call to collegians to meet at the general convention of Young Men's Christian Associations at Louisville. Twenty-two colleges responded and sent delegates. Mr. Wishard was appointed international secretary. One hundred and seventy-five associations have now been formed, with nearly ten thousand members. These colleges report about ninety Bible-classes during the past year. Fifteen hundred students have professed conversion through the association; of these forty have decided to enter the ministry, and two of these are going to the foreign fields.

The work is among the men most likely to occupy the highest position in the country, hence its importance is very great. Mr. Wishard is quite overtaxed and help has been given him at times, but he needs, and so also does the railroad work, an assistant secretary.

There is a class of men in our community who are almost constantly traveling. Rarely at home, they go from city to city. The temptations to these men are peculiar and very great. In 1879, Mr. E.W. Watkins, himself one of this class of commercial travelers, was appointed secretary in their behalf. He has since visited all the principal associations, and has created an interest in these neglected men. Among the appliances which are productive of the most good is the traveler's ticket, which entitles him to all the privileges of membership in any place where an association may be. A second most valuable work is the hotel-visiting done by more than fifty associations each week. The hotel-registers are consulted on Saturday afternoon, and a personal note is sent to each young man, giving him the times of service at the several churches and inviting him to the rooms. Is it necessary to call the attention of business men to the importance to themselves of this work? Is it not patent? You cannot follow the young man whose honesty and clear-headedness is of such consequence to you. God has put it into the heart of this association to try and care for those men, upon whom your success largely depends. Can you be blind to its value? Every individual man who employs commercial travelers should aid the work. But how is all this great work for young men carried on? It requires now thirty thousand dollars a year to do it. Of this sum New York pays more than one half, Pennsylvania about one sixth, and Massachusetts less than one fifteenth. But to do this work properly,—this work of the universal church of Christ for young men,—at least one third more, or forty thousand dollars a year, is needed. There is another need, however, much harder to meet—the men to fill the places calling earnestly for general secretaries. There are nearly three hundred and fifty paid employees in the field, representing about two hundred associations. Since every association should have a secretary, and there are nearly, if not quite, nine hundred, the need will be clearly seen. This need it is proposed to meet by training men in schools established for the purpose. Something of this has already been done in New York State and at Peoria, Illinois, and there must soon be a regular training-school established to accommodate from fifty to one hundred men.

This is a very meagre sketch of a great work. How inadequately it portrays it, none know so well as those who are immediately connected with it. Could you have been present at a dinner given a few months ago to the secretaries of the international committee, and heard each man describe his field and its needs; could you have seen the intensity with which each endeavored to make us feel what he himself realized, that his special field was the most important,—you would have come to our conclusion: that each field was all-important, and that each man was in his proper place, peculiarly fitted for it and assigned to it by the Master.

A prominent divine has lately said: "I believe the Young Men's Christian Association to be the greatest religious fact of the nineteenth century."

What has been effected by this fact? Thousands of young men in all parts of the world have been brought to Jesus Christ. It has been the training-school for Moody, Whittle, and hosts of laymen who are to-day proclaiming the simple Gospel. It has organized great evangelistic movements both here and abroad. It formed the Christian Commission, which not only relieved the wants of the body during our war, but sent hundreds of Christ's missionaries to the hospitals and battle-fields. It has gloriously manifested the unity of Christ's true church. It stands to-day an organic body, instinct with one life, spreading its limbs through the world, active, alert, ready at any moment to respond to the call of the church, and enables it to present an unbroken front to superstition and infidelity, which already rear their brazen heads against Christ and his church, and will soon be in open rebellion and actual warfare, and which Christ at his coming will forever destroy.

[NOTE.—Through the kindness of Messrs. Harper and Brothers, of New York, we present to our readers the two portraits in this article. For the cuts of the buildings we are indebted to the Chicago Watchman, mention of which is made above.—R.S., Jr.]

GEORGE FULLER

BY SIDNEY DICKINSON

The death of George Fuller has removed a strong and original figure from the activity of American art, and added a weighty name to its history. To speak of him now, while his work is fresh in the public mind, is a labor of some peril; so easy is it, when the sense of loss is keen, to make mistakes in judgment, and to allow the friendly spirit to prevail over the judicial, in an estimation of him as a man and a painter. Yet he has gone in and out before us long enough to make a study of him profitable, and to give us, even now, some occasion for an opinion as to the place he is likely to occupy in the annals of our native art. Mr. Fuller held a peculiar position in American painting, and one which seems likely to remain hereafter unfilled. He followed no one, and had no followers; his art was the outgrowth of personal temperament and experience, rather than the result of teaching, and although he studied others, he was himself his only master. In other men whose names are prominent in our art, we seem to see the direction of an outside influence. Stuart and Copley confessed to the teaching of the English school of their day—a school brilliant but formal, and holding close guiding-reins over its disciples; Benjamin West became denationalized, so far as his art was concerned; Allston showed the impression of England, Italy, and Flanders, all at once, in his refined and thoughtful style, and Hunt manifested in every stroke of his brilliant brush the learned and facile methods that are in vogue in the leading ateliers of modern Paris. In these men, and in the followers whom their preëminent ability drew after them, we perceive the dominant impulse to be of alien origin; Fuller alone, of all the great ones in our art, was in thought and action purely and simply American. The influence that led others into the error of imitation, seems to have been exerted unavailingly upon his self-reliant mind. We shall search vainly if we look elsewhere than within himself for the suggestions upon which his art was established. Superficial resemblances to other painters are sometimes to be noted in his works, but in governing principle and habit of thought he was serenely and grandly alone.

We must regard him thus if we would study him understandingly, and gain from our observation a correct estimate of his power. We think of our other painters as in the crowd, and amid the affairs of men, and detect in their art a certain uneasiness which the bustle about them necessarily caused. We perceive this most in Hunt, who was emphatically a man of the world, and in Stuart, who shows in some of his later work that his position as the court painter of America, while it aided his purse and reputation, harmed his repose; least in Allston, whose tastes were literary, whose love was in retirement, and who would have been a poet had not circumstances first placed a brush and palette in his hands. Allston, however, enjoyed popularity, and was courted by the best society of his time, and was not permitted, although he doubtless longed for it, to indulge to its full extent his chaste and dreamy fancy. It may be said without disrespect to his undoubted powers, that he would have been less esteemed in his own day if his art had not been largely conventional, and thus easily understood by those who had studied the accepted masters of painting. He lacked positive force of idea, as his works clearly show,—that quality which was among the most characteristic traits of Fuller's method, and made him at once the greatest genius, and the man most misunderstood, among contemporary American painters.

Although men who have not had "advantages" in life are naturally prone to regret their deprivation, they frequently owe their success to this seeming bar against opportunity. We have often seen illustrated in our art the fact that favorable circumstances do not necessarily insure success, and now from the life of Fuller we gain the still more important truth, that power is never so well aroused as in the face of obstacles. Few men endured more for art than he; none have waited more uncomplainingly for a recognition that was sure to come by-and-by, or received with greater serenity the approbation which the dull world came at last to bestow. His history is most wholesome in its record of steadfast resting upon conviction, and teaches quite as strongly as his pictures do, the value of absorption in a lofty idea.

If the saying that those nations are the happiest that have no history is true of men, Mr. Fuller's life must be regarded as exceptionally fortunate. Considered by itself, it was quiet and uneventful, and had little to excite general interest; but when viewed in its relation to the practice of his art, it is found to be full of eloquent suggestions to all who, like him, have been appointed to win success through suffering. The narrative of his experience comprises two great periods—the preparation, which covered thirty-four years, and the achievement, to the enjoyment of which less than eight years were permitted. The first period is subdivided into two, of which one embraces eighteen years, from the time when, at the age of twenty, he entered upon the study of his art, to his retirement from the world to the exile of his Deerfield farm; the other including sixteen years of seclusion, until, at the age of fifty-four, he came forth again to proclaim a new revelation. The first part of his career may be dismissed without any extended consideration. Its record consists of an almost unrelieved account of struggle, indifferent success, and lack of appreciation and encouragement, in the cities of Boston and New York. In Boston he appeared as the student, rather than the producer of works, and laid the foundation of his style in observation of the paintings of Stuart, Copley, Allston, and Alexander,—all excellent models upon which to base a practice, although destined to show little of their influence upon the pictures which he painted in the maturity of his power. It is not to be doubted, however, that all these men, and particularly Stuart, made an impression upon him which he was never afterward wholly able to conceal. We may see even in some of his latest works, under his own peculiar manner, suggestions of Stuart, particularly in portraits of women, which in pose and expression, and to a considerable degree in color, show much of that dignity and composure which so distinguish the female heads of our greatest portrait-painter. He always admired Stuart, and in his later years spoke much of him, with strong appreciation for his skill in describing character, and the refined taste which is such a marked feature of his best manner.

His work in Boston made no particular impression upon the public mind, and after five years' trial of it he removed to New York, where he joined that brilliant circle of painters and sculptors which, with its followers, has made one of the strongest impressions, if not the most valuable or permanent, upon the art of America. During his residence in that city he devoted himself almost exclusively to portrait-painting, in which he developed a manner more distinguished for conventional excellence than any particular individuality. It was remarked of him, however, that he was disposed, even at this time, to seek to present the thought and disposition of his subjects more strongly than their merely physical features, and among his principal associates excited no little appreciative comment upon this tendency. In some of his portraits of women of that period, wherein he evidently attempted to present the superior fineness and sensibility of the feminine nature, this effort toward ideality is quite strongly indicated; they are painted with a more hesitating and lingering touch than his portraits of men, and with a certain seeming lack of confidence, which throws about them a thin fold of that veil of etherialism and mystery which so enwraps nearly all his pictures of the last eight years. This treatment, however, seems to have been at that time more the result of experiment than conviction; later in life he wrought its suggestions into a system, the principles of which we may study further on. His earlier work, as has been said, was chiefly confined to portrait-painting, although it is a significant fact that among his pictures of that time are two which show that the feeling for poetical and imaginative effort was working in him. At a comparatively early age he painted an impression of Coleridge's Genevieve, which showed marked evidence of power, and later, after seeing a picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his artist friends, produced a study which he afterward seems to have developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding a bird closely against its breast. These exercises, however, seem to have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in leading him to the practice in which he afterward became absorbed.

His life in New York, which was interrupted only by three winter trips to the South, whither he went in the hope of securing some commissions for portraits, was an uneventful experience of very modest pecuniary success, and brought him as the only official honor of his life an election as associate of the National Academy of Design. He then went to Europe, where, for eight months, he carefully studied the old masters in the principal galleries of England and the Continent. This visit to the Old World was of incalculable value to him in the method of painting which he afterward made his own, and, in point of fact, gave him his first decided inclination toward it. Its best influence, however, was in giving him confidence in himself, and assurance of the reasonableness of the views which he had already begun to entertain. He had been led before to regard the old masters as superior to rivalry and incapable of weakness, superhuman characters, indeed, whose works should discourage effort. Instead of this, however, he found them to be men like himself, with their share of defect and error, yet made grand by inspiration and idea, and this knowledge greatly encouraged him, a man who of all painters was at once the most modest and devoted. Most painters who resort to Europe to study the old art find there one or two men whose works make the strongest appeals to their liking, and, devoting their attention chiefly to these, they show ever after the marks of an influence that is easily traced to its source; Fuller, however, observed with broader and more penetrating view, and, as his works show, seems to have studied men less than principles, and to have been filled with admiration, not so much for particular practices as for the common and lofty spirit in which the greatest of the world's painters labored. The colorists and chiaroscurists, such as Titian on the one hand and Rembrandt on the other, seem to have impressed him particularly, and of all men Titian the most strongly, as many of his pictures testify, and as such glowing works as the Arethusa and the Boy and Bird unmistakably show. Yet it was not in matter or in manner, but in the expression of a great truth, that the old masters most strongly affected him. He felt at once, and grew to admire greatly, their repose and modesty, calm strength and undisturbed temper, and drew from them the important principle that true genius may be known by its confessing neither pride nor self-distrust. The serenity of their style he sought at once to appropriate, and thereafter worked as much as possible in imitation of their evident purpose, striving simply to do his best, without any question of whether the result would please, or another's effort be reckoned as greater than his own. It became a governing principle with him never to seek to outdo any one, or to feel anything but pleasure at another's success, for he was not a man who could fail to recognize the truth that envy is fatal to a fine mood in any labor. Few artists, we may well believe, study the great art of the world in this spirit, or derive from it such a lesson.

On his return to America, he betook himself to his native town of Deerfield, to assume for a time the care of the ancestral farm, which the death of his father had placed in his hands. He had returned from Europe full of inspired ideas, and was apparently ready to go on at once in new paths of labor; but the voice of duty seemed to him to call him away from his chosen life, and he obeyed its summons without hesitation. Moreover, he loved the country and the family homestead, and may have perceived, also, that the condition of art in Boston and New York was not such as to encourage an original purpose, and that, if he was ever to gain success, he must develop himself in quiet, and aloof from the distracting influences of other methods and men. It is easy to perceive, with the complete record of his life before us, that this experience of labor and thought upon the Deerfield farm, although at first sight forming an hiatus in his career, was really its most pregnant period, and that without it the Fuller who is now so much admired might have been lost to us, and the spirit that appears in his later works never have been awakened. It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no congenial dwelling-place in towns, but makes its home in the fields and on the hillsides, to which the poet-painter, depressed but not cast down by his experience of life, repaired to work and dream. For sixteen years, in the midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he drew from the New-England soil that he tilled, and the air that he breathed, an inspiration which never failed him. The flavor of the quiet valley fills all his canvases. We see in them the spaciousness of its meadows, the inviting slope of its low hills, the calm grandeur of its encircling mountains, the mysterious gloom and wholesome brightness of its changing skies, the atmosphere of history and romance which is its breath and life. Song and story have found many incidents for treatment in this locality. Not far from the farm where Fuller's daily work was done, the tragedy of Bloody Brook was enacted; the fields which he tilled have their legend of Indian ambuscade and massacre; the soil is sown, as with dragon's teeth, with the arrow-heads and battle-axes of many bitter conflicts; even to the ancient house where, in recent years, the painter's summer easel was set up, a former owner was brought home with the red man's bullet in his breast. The menace of midnight attack seems even now to the wanderer in the darkness to burden the air of these mournful meadows, and tradition shows that here were felt the ripples of that tide of superstitious frenzy which flowed from Salem through all the early colonies. No place could have furnished more potent suggestions to the art-idealist than this, and although it did not lead him to paint its tragic history (for no man had less liking for violence and passion than he), it impressed him deeply with its concurrent records of endurance and devotion. Nor did it invite him, as it might have done in the case of a weaker man, into mere description, but having aroused his thought, it submitted itself wholly to the treatment of his strong and original genius. He approached his task with a broad and comprehensive vision, and a loving and inquiring soul. He was not satisfied with the revelation of his eyes alone, but sought earnestly for the secret of nature's life, and of its influence upon the sensitive mind of man. He perceived the truth that nature without man is naught, even as there is no color without light, and strove earnestly to show in his art the relations that they sustain to each other. He saw, also, that the material in each is nothing without the spirit which they share in common, and thus he painted not places, but the influence of places, even as he painted not persons merely, but their natures and minds. It is for this reason that, although we see in all his pictures where landscape finds a place the meadows, trees, and skies of Deerfield, we also see much more,—the general and unlocated spirit of New-England scenery.

This is the true impressionism—a system to which Fuller was always constant in later life, and which he developed grandly. He was, however, as far removed as possible from that cheap, shallow, and idealess school of French painters whose wrongful appropriation of the name "Impressionist" has prejudiced us against the principle that it involves. The inherent difference between them and Fuller lies in this—he exercised a choice, and thought the beautiful alone to be worthy of description, while they selected nothing, but painted indiscriminately all things, with whatever preference they indicated lying in the direction of the strong and ugly, as being most imperative in its demands for attention. Fuller's subjects were always sweet and noble, and it followed as a matter of course that his treatment of them was refined and strong. His idea was also broad; he sought for the typical in nature and life, and grew inevitably into a continually widening and more comprehensive style. He taught himself to lose the sense of detail, and to strike at once to the centre, presenting the vital idea with decision, and departing from it with increasing vagueness of treatment, until the whole area of his work was filled with a harmonious and carefully graduated sense of suggestion. He arrived at his method by an original way of studying the natural world. He did not, as most artists do, take his paint-box and easel and devote himself to description, and from his studies work out the finished picture. Instead, he disencumbered himself of all materials for making memoranda, and merely stood before the scene that impressed him, looking upon it for hours at a time. Then he betook himself to his studio, and there worked from the impression that his mind had formed under the guiding-hand of his fancy, the result being that nature and human thought appeared together upon the canvas, giving a double grace and power. The process was subtle, and not to be described clearly even by the painter himself, who found his work so largely a matter of inspiration that he was never able to make copies of his pictures. They grew out of his consciousness in a strange way whose secret he could not grasp; to the end of his life he was an inquirer, always hesitating, and never confident in anything except that art was truth, and that he who followed it must walk in modesty and humbleness of spirit before the greatness of its mystery. A man of ideas and sentiment, remote from the clamor of schools and the complaints of critics, with recollections of the grandest art of the world in his mind, and beautiful aspects of nature continually before his eyes, he could hardly fail to work out a style of marked originality. The effort, however, was slow; one does not erase on the instant the impressions that eighteen years of study and practice have made, and Fuller found his life at Deerfield none too long to rid him of his respect for formulas.

His experience there was a continuous round of study. He completed little, although he painted much, inexorably blotting out, no matter after what expenditure of labor, the work that failed to respond to his idea, and striving constantly to be simple, straightforward, and impressive, without being vapid, arrogant, or dogmatic. He possessed in large measure that rarest of gifts to genius—modesty—and approached the secrets of nature and life more tremblingly as he passed from their outer to their inner circles. It was a necessity of his peculiar feeling and manner of study that he should develop a lingering, hesitating, half-uncertain style of painting, which, however variously it may be viewed by different minds, is undoubtedly of the utmost effectiveness in describing the principles, rather than the facts, of nature and life. This way of presenting his idea, which some call a "mannerism,"—a term that has wrongly come to have a suggestion of contempt attached to it,—was with him a principle, and employed by him as the one in which he could best express truth. Art may justly claim great latitude in this endeavor, and schools and systems arrogate too much when they seek to define its limitations. Absolute truth to nature is impossible in art, which is constrained to lie to the eye in order to satisfy the mind, and continually transposes the harmonies of earth and sky into the minor key. Fuller offended the senses often, but he touched that nerve-centre in the heart, without which impressions are not truly recognized. He won liking, rather than startled men into it, and his art, instead of approaching, retired and beckoned. His figures never "came out of the frame at you," as is the common expression of admiration nowadays. He put everything at a distance, made it reposeful, and drew about figure and landscape an atmosphere which not only made them beautiful, but established a strange and reciprocal mood of sentiment between them. He alone of all American painters filled the whole of his canvas with air; others place a barrier to atmosphere in their middle distance, and it comes no farther, but he brought it over to the nearest inch of foreground. This treatment, while it aided the quietness and restful mystery of his pictures, also strengthened his constant effort to avoid marked contrasts. He sought always a general impression, and ruthlessly sacrificed everything that called attention to itself at the expense of the whole. Yet he was not a man of swift insight in comprehensive matters, nor one who could be called clever. Weighty in thought as in figure, he moved slowly and in long waves, and although of marked quickness in intuition, he seemed to distrust this quality in himself until he had proved it by reason. He received his motive as by a spark quicker than the lightning's, and when he began a work saw its intention clearly, although its form and details were wholly obscured. Out of a mist of darkness he saw a face shine dimly with some light of joy or sorrow that was in it, and at the moment caught its suggestion upon the waiting canvas. Then came inquiry, explanation, reasoning, the exercise of a manly and poetic sensibility, and endless experiment with lines and forms, of which the greater part were meaningless, until by unwearied searching, and constant trial and correction, the complete idea was expressed at last.

When a painter produces works in this strange fashion, an involved and confused manner of technical treatment becomes inevitable. The schools, which glorify manual skill and the swift and exhilarating production of effects, cannot appreciate it, for all their teaching is opposed to the principle that makes technique subordinate to idea, and they cannot look with favor upon a man who boldly reverses everything. The perfect art undoubtedly rests upon a combination of sublime thought and entire command of resources, but while we wait for this we shall not make mistake if we consider the effective, even if unlicensed, expression of idea superior to a facility that has become cheap from hundreds mastering it yearly. We cannot close our eyes to Fuller's technical faults and weaknesses, but his pictures would undeniably be a less precious heritage to American art than they now are, if he had not been great enough to perceive that academic skill becomes weak by just so much as it is magnified, and is strong only when viewed in its just relation, as the means to an end. We perplex and confuse ourselves in studying his work, and are naturally a little irritated that he keeps his secret of power so well; yet we cannot help feeling that his style is wonderfully adapted to the end in view, and perhaps the only appropriate medium for the expression of a habit of thought that is as peculiar as itself. Schools will insist, and with reason, upon working by rule; yet in art, as in other discipline of teaching, genius does not develop itself until it escapes from its instructors.