Part 17 (1/2)
”To whomsoever it may concern.
”I have received such extraordinary kindness from Americans, and number so many of them among my friends, that it would seem invidious if I selected those whom I ventured to believe would oblige me were it possible. I shall therefore say, in the simplest of words, that should my dear friend, the Painter Moscheles, meet with any individual whose sympathy I have been privileged to obtain, whatever favour and a.s.sistance may be rendered to him, or his charming wife, will const.i.tute one more claim to the grat.i.tude of
ROBERT BROWNING.”
One of my first visitors was Dr. Fordyce Barker, the eminent physician, and more particularly the idol of the fair s.e.x, which owes him so large a debt of grat.i.tude. He ignored the given time above mentioned, and, calling at some unearthly hour before I was fairly presentable, he was away again before I could find my boots.
”What have you come to America for?” was his first shot. The question coming suddenly upon me, I found no better answer to it than, ”Well, just to have a look round--wanted to see the latest thing out in the way of civilisation.”
”But you are a portrait-painter, I understand?”
”Yes, I am.”
”Then you have come here to paint portraits?”
”Well--certainly,” I hummed and hawed--”in case the opportunity should present itself--and if I should find that”--but he cut me short (beating about the bush is not popular in the States).
”How much do you charge?” he asked bluntly, and without the least regard for the sensitive nature of a British artist, so I had to make a plunge and tell him; so much for head-size and so much for a three-quarter canvas.
”All right,” he said, and was off.
Later on I painted him, and he was ever a good friend to me.
It took me some time to get accustomed to the outspoken ways of the American. With us the artist is a privileged being, unlike any other producer or vendor, but there everybody takes it for granted that he is quite ready to accept dollars in exchange for his work. The waiter in the cafe, the artist who shampooed me, or the clerk in the hotel, wanted to know my charges, and it once or twice happened that they turned their knowledge to good account.
”Now, sir,” said a clerk in the Hotel Richelieu, Chicago, where I was staying, to a wealthy senator, also a guest at the hotel--”now, sir, this is Mr. Felix Moscheles, the celebrated English artist, and I guess you had better have your portrait and your wife's portrait painted, whilst he is here to fix them up.” That introduction led to commissions as acceptable from the artistic point of view as they were remunerative, and to the most cordial relations between client and artist.
But I am drifting away from New York, where I want to remain for a while. I had not been there many hours before I went for a ramble on Broadway (the American walks _on_ the street, not _in_ it, as we do). I always loved to explore the busy, bustling thoroughfares of a big city; it is there you can feel the throbbing feverish pulse of an active community; in the Park or on the Corso you only get that languid fas.h.i.+onable-doctor sort of pulse, which takes its airing in a landau or a victoria, a correct and well-regulated pulse that knows its duty to itself and to the society it is privileged to beat in.
With such predilection for high-pressure and a rattling pace, I soon found myself making friends with the Broadway. I always had a weakness, too, for shops, and there were miles of them; stores they call them, and every mortal thing is stored behind their immense panes of plate-gla.s.s, or in those outposts of business, the show-cases, that go dodging about the footpath, and look as if they were on their way to some international exhibition. Anything and everything man can desire to smooth the th.o.r.n.y path from the cradle to cremation, he will find in the Broadway.
Talking of the th.o.r.n.y path, I was much struck by the liberty, not to say licence, accorded to the paving stones, each of which acted quite independently of his neighbour. The noise, as the vehicles ploughed their way along the road, and as it was echoed by the ma.s.sive stone buildings, was really appalling. Infernal, I should say, but that adjective is too good in this case, for the Inferno was at least paved with good intentions, whereas that road meant mischief and strife, and revelled in the purity of its own cussedness.
I could not help speculating as to what dear old mother Regent Street would think of it all; how she would be shocked at the way in which that transatlantic upstart hands up his goods from the bas.e.m.e.nt, and pushes them just under your nose, or piles them up sky-high and block deep, before he consents to put a roof on them. Father Oxford Street, too, would be scandalised, and so would his time-honoured brother-streets, that fancy themselves arteries, as they wind their crooked way from the fas.h.i.+onable brick piles of the west to the golden-calf temples of the east. They do their best, suffering as they are from chronic congestion, and I have loved them since the days of my boyhood. No, I certainly mean no disrespect to the British lion and his partner the unicorn, nor to the griffin at Temple Bar, nor to the bulls and bears farther on, nor to the turtles and plovers' eggs at the Mansion House; least of all to the bank-notes opposite, good company as they always are.
America is a country of contradictions; that is a safe way of putting it, as the same can be said of all countries. Wherever he goes, the stranger sees with his own eyes, feels with his own heart, and above all, judges according to the state of his own liver. One man practises his b.u.mp of veneration on all he meets; another travels on the _nil admirari_ principle. Golden threads traverse the road of either, and so do rotten threads. The first man seizes the golden ones and is happy; the second picks up the rotten ones and makes himself equally happy with those. Both come home triumphantly to show their threads, and to say, ”Behold, that is what I found!” It must be difficult for the same hand to pick up both sorts of thread, and to present them impartially, weighing one set against the other and judging dispa.s.sionately. There are some strong men who can do it, and there would be more of them, I believe, if it were not for that liver. In my case, that organ may have been in a satisfactory condition, and have prompted me to be sociable.
So I was rather disappointed when I found that there was more formality in the great Republic than under the old Monarchy, and that if I wanted to talk to somebody, I had to be introduced first.
Day after day I have sat with my wife in various hotels at some little table laid for four, sharing it with some other Mr. and Mrs., without exchanging a word. Elsewhere we should soon have been playing that stimulating parlour-game of inter-social hide-and-seek, or we might for the time being have formed a pleasant little _partie carree_. Sometimes my heart went out to my neighbours, I think in a true Christian spirit, but I could have seen them starve, and yet not have dared to hand them the mustard or pa.s.s them the b.u.t.ter. I knew they would have looked upon me with suspicion; yet I flatter myself that, with a little discernment, they could have seen that I was not a shady character, and that neither I nor that most artless and guileless partner of mine was capable of playing off the confidence trick on the clergyman opposite, or on the charming elderly lady with the white hair and the two golden-locked grandchildren.
We English are often reproached with our respect for caste. We emphasise the difference of position in the social scale, whereas the American--unless, to be sure, he be a Bostonian--takes every opportunity to emphasise his indifference for such distinction. We think we know a gentleman when we see him; he rather mistrusts his judgment, perhaps because he has seen fewer generations of the species than we have; so he sometimes mistakes a sheep for a wolf in disguise, and only recognises his error when the sheep is formally introduced, and thus guaranteed as the genuine article. Perhaps it is that, by dint of proclaiming that one man is as good as another, the citizen of the Great Republic finds himself arriving at the conclusion that one man is as bad as another, and so it is for the stranger to show cause why he should be allowed to pa.s.s the hotel mustard or b.u.t.ter.
All that, I must admit, applies, as far as I know, only to the few cities I visited; I had much too good a time in each of them, painting and lecturing, studying and learning, to go away in a hurry; so I cannot speak of the boys on the ranches or the girls in California; nor can I say whether the fifty or sixty odd millions of Americans to whom I was not introduced would have taken kindly to me or I to them, had we met.
My first visit to the United States was not the mere excursion I had expected it to be. I remained six months, mostly in New York. First I made myself a temporary studio at the Park Avenue Hotel, but soon finding that I wanted more easel and elbow-room, I took a flat and a studio in ”The Chelsea,” furnished and decorated it _right-away_, and settled down to a winter's work. When the spring came, I just locked my door, told the clerk in the office to set the burglar alarm, and went off to the other Chelsea, my home in London. So, for three years, I divided my time pretty equally between the two countries.
I look back with pleasure to many an incident connected with the portraits I painted in America. So, too, to my experiences on the platform. Not only was I allowed to lecture, but I was even listened to. To be sure, my lectures were only announced as ”Studio-talks,” and I took care they should be very much varied according to my audiences. The inexhaustible subject of Art had to be presented in one way when addressing the students in Philadelphia or Chicago, in another when speaking to the select circle of the Thursday Evening Club in New York.
Considerations that would be appropriate to put before a large gathering of beautiful and gifted young ladies at one of their great colleges, were not the same that would appeal to upwards of a thousand Negroes and Indians, students at the famous Hampton Schools in Virginia. In each case, however, I ill.u.s.trated my lecture by painting a life-size head from nature, my subject being mostly selected from the audience.
I cannot refrain from mentioning one instance of the warmth with which my efforts were occasionally rewarded. ”Thanks!” said one of the gentlemen officially connected with the Hampton Schools, at the close of my lecture, ”a thousand thanks! You cannot realise what pleasure you have given to those young men and women.--Understood it? I should think so. Why, I can a.s.sure you, they have enjoyed it as much as if they had been to a circus.”