Part 10 (1/2)
It is hard to make people understand the enthusiasm these decorations have excited in both teachers and pupils. The directress of one of our large schools was telling me of the help and pleasure the prints and casts had been to her; she had given them as subjects for the cla.s.s compositions, and used them in a hundred different ways as object-lessons. As the children are graduated from room to room, a great variety of high-cla.s.s subjects can be brought to their notice by varying the decorations.
It is by the eye princ.i.p.ally that taste is educated. ”We speak with admiration of the eighth sense common among Parisians, and envy them their magic power of combining simple materials into an artistic whole.
The reason is that for generations the eyes of those people have been unconsciously educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses that poverty entails.
If you have a subject of interest in your mind, it often happens that every book you open, every person you speak with, refers to that topic.
I never remember having seen an explanation offered of this phenomenon.
The other morning, while this article was lying half finished on my desk, I opened the last number of a Paris paper and began reading an account of the drama, _Les Mauvais Bergers_ (treating of that perilous subject, the ”strikes”), which Sarah Bernhardt had just had the courage to produce before the Paris public. In the third act, when the owner of the factory receives the disaffected hands, and listens to their complaints, the leader of the strike (an intelligent young workman), besides shorter hours and increased pay, demands that recreation rooms be built where the toilers, their wives, and their children may pa.s.s unoccupied hours in the enjoyment of attractive surroundings, and cries in conclusion: ”We, the poor, need some poetry and some art in our lives, man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty!”
In commending the use of decoration as a means of bringing pleasure into dull, cramped lives, one is too often met by the curious argument that taste is innate. ”Either people have it or they haven't,” like a long nose or a short one, and it is useless to waste good money in trying to improve either. ”It would be much more to the point to spend your money in giving the poor children a good roast-beef dinner at Christmas than in placing the bust of Clytie before them.” That argument has crushed more attempts to elevate the poor than any other ever advanced. If it were listened to, there would never be any progress made, because there are always thousands of people who are hungry.
When we reflect how painfully ill-arranged rooms or ugly colors affect our senses, and remember that less fortunate neighbors suffer as much as we do from hideous environments, it seems like keeping sunlight from a plant, or fresh air out of a sick-room, to refuse glimpses of the beautiful to the poor when it is in our power to give them this satisfaction with a slight effort. Nothing can be more encouraging to those who occasionally despair of human nature than the good results already obtained by this small attempt in the schools.
We fall into the error of imagining that because the Apollo Belvedere and the Square of St. Mark's have become stale to us by reproduction they are necessarily so to others. The great and the wealthy of the world form no idea of the longing the poor feel for a little variety in their lives.
They do not know what they want. They have no standards to guide them, but the desire is there. Let us offer ourselves the satisfaction, as we start off for pleasure trips abroad or to the mountains, of knowing that at home the routine of study is lightened for thousands of children by the counterfeit presentment of the scenes we are enjoying; that, as we float up the Golden Horn or sit in the moonlight by the Parthenon, far away at home some child is dreaming of those fair scenes as she raises her eyes from her task, and is unconsciously imbibing a love of the beautiful, which will add a charm to her humble life, and make the present labors lighter. If the child never lives to see the originals, she will be happier for knowing that somewhere in the world domed mosques mirror themselves in still waters, and marble G.o.ds, the handiwork of long-dead nations, stand in the golden sunlight and silently preach the gospel of the beautiful.
CHAPTER 21-Seven Small d.u.c.h.esses
Since those ”precious” days when the habitues of the Hotel Rambouillet first raised social intercourse to the level of a fine art, the morals and manners, the amus.e.m.e.nts and intrigues of great French ladies have interested the world and influenced the ways of civilized nations.
Thanks to Memoirs and Maxims, we are able to reconstruct the life of a seventeenth or eighteenth century n.o.blewoman as completely as German archeologists have rebuilt the temple of the Wingless Victory on the Acropolis from surrounding debris.
Interest in French society has, however, diminished during this century, ceasing almost entirely with the Second Empire, when foreign women gave the tone to a parvenu court from which the older aristocracy held aloof in disgust behind the closed gates of their ”hotels” and historic chateaux.
With the exception of Balzac, few writers have drawn authentic pictures of nineteenth-century n.o.blewomen in France; and his vivid portrayals are more the creations of genius than correct descriptions of a caste.
During the last fifty years French aristocrats have ceased to be factors even in matters social, the sceptre they once held having pa.s.sed into alien hands, the daughters of Albion to a great extent replacing their French rivals in influencing the ways of the ”world,”-a change, be it remarked in pa.s.sing, that has not improved the tone of society or contributed to the spread of good manners.
People like the French n.o.bles, engaged in sulking and attempting to overthrow or boycott each succeeding regime, must naturally lose their influence. They have held aloof so long-fearing to compromise themselves by any advances to the powers that be, and restrained by countless traditions from taking an active part in either the social or political strife-that little by little they have been pa.s.sed by and ignored; which is a pity, for amid the ruin of many hopes and ambitions they have remained true to their caste and handed down from generation to generation the secret of that gracious urbanity and tact which distinguished the Gallic n.o.blewoman in the last century from the rest of her kind and made her so deft in the difficult art of pleasing-and being pleased.
Within the last few years there have, however, been signs of a change.
Young members of historic houses show an amusing inclination to escape from their austere surroundings and resume the place their grandparents abdicated. If it is impossible to rule as formerly, they at any rate intend to get some fun out of existence.
This joyous movement to the front is being made by the young matrons enlisted under the ”Seven little d.u.c.h.esses'” banner. Oddly enough, a baker's half-dozen of ducal coronets are worn at this moment, in France, by small and sprightly women, who have shaken the dust of centuries from those ornaments and sport them with a decidedly modern air!
It is the members of this clique who, in Paris during the spring, at their chateaux in the summer and autumn, and on the Riviera after Christmas, lead the amus.e.m.e.nts and strike the key for the modern French world.
No one of these light-hearted ladies takes any particular precedence over the others. All are young, and some are wonderfully nice to look at.
The d.u.c.h.esse d'Uzes is, perhaps, the handsomest, good looks being an inheritance from her mother, the beautiful and wayward d.u.c.h.esse de Chaulme.
There is a vivid grace about the daughter, an intense vitality that suggests some beautiful being of the forest. As she moves and speaks one almost expects to hear the quick breath coming and going through her quivering nostrils, and see foam on her full lips. Her mother's tragic death has thrown a glamor of romance around the daughter's life that heightens the witchery of her beauty.
Next in good looks comes an American, the d.u.c.h.esse de la Rochefoucauld, although marriage (which, as de Maupa.s.sant remarked, is rarely becoming) has not been propitious to that gentle lady. By rights she should have been mentioned first, as her husband outranks, not only all the men of his age, but also his cousin, the old Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville, to whom, however, a sort of brevet rank is accorded on account of his years, his wealth, and the high rank of his two wives. It might almost be a.s.serted that our fair compatriot wears the oldest coronet in France. She certainly is mistress of three of the finest chateaux in that country, among which is Miromail, where the family live, and Liancourt, a superb Renaissance structure, a delight to the artist's soul.
The young d.u.c.h.esse de Brissac runs her two comrades close as regards looks. Brissac is the son of Mme. de Tredern, whom Newporters will remember two years ago, when she enjoyed some weeks of our summer season.
Their chateau was built by the Brissac of Henri IV.'s time and is one of the few that escaped uninjured through the Revolution, its vast stone corridors and ma.s.sive oak ceilings, its moat and battlements, standing to-day unimpaired amid a group of chateaux including Chaumont, Rochecotte, Azay-le-Rideau, Usse, Chenonceau, within ”dining” distance of each other, that form a centre of gayety next in importance to Paris and Cannes. In the autumn these s.p.a.cious castles are filled with joyous bands and their ample stables with horses. A couple of years ago, when the king of Portugal and his suite were entertained at Chaumont for a week of stag-hunting, over three hundred people, servants, and guests, slept under its roof, and two hundred horses were housed in its stables.