  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 formidable. "The better to eat you with, my dear!" Nothing escaped 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 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. "KÜnstler," says Goethe, "rede nicht. Bilde!" (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 somehow would have to be with a brush.... Oh, he came and went disguised in the business suit of a young man dedicated 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 himself 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 Kropotkin. 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 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 painting. The precaution was needless. If he had laughed outright 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 natural voice. Was this our shy, silent Fritz? Why, the impudence 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 conversing delightedly with himself over his work. He has forgotten time and place. Intense mental concentration, and nervous 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 peek here, a peck there, like a dainty bird. Again he paints in sweeping flourishes, beating a kind of rapturous rhythm with his brush, gesturing with it between strokes, like an orchestral conductor hewing out the 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 sudden resolution in the stiffening of tendons.... "And above all this quiet animation and silent dexterity is the regnant, gallant head with dark eyes flashing mastery; 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 concealments. Liberty! That was all very well for Fritz, but how about his sitter? 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: "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. |
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