Across The Plains
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Across The Plains
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The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost
all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was
from the same class, numerically so small, that the principal
officials were selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would
describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which
remained to him. You would ask him how that came about, and elicit
some tangled story back-foremost, from which you gathered that the
Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans
greedy like children, but no other certain fact. Their merits and
their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former
landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled
with the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides,
and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee
craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a
reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great
minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it
is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I
know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case
occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has
signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken in the
matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that
he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word."
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought
up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and
honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but
not the creation of agreements. This single unworldly trait will
account for much of that revolution of which we are speaking. The
Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the
accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire
booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the more
scupulous race.
Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely
seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is,
of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in
the course of being solved in the various States of the American
Union. I am reminded of an anecdote. Some years ago, at a great
sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a
small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The agent had the
curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible
use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. "And what," he asked,
"do you propose to call this?" "I'm no very sure," replied the
grocer, "but I think it's going to turn out port." In the older
Eastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races
in going to turn out English, or thereabout. But the problem is
indefinitely varied in other zones. The elements are differently
mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial belt and
in the group of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these
last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or
evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own.
In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day
after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and
a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from Illinois,
a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and
from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a
foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race
contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have
taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but
the debasing use of opium. And chief among these influences is
that of the Mexicans.
The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. They still
preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their
affairs snug to themselves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez,
the bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him
in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and
was seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The
year that I was there, there occurred two reputed murders. As the
Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of
every one behind his back, it is not possible for me to judge how
much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one
case every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that
there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an instant of
taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of course,
characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a
word in this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject,
they seemed not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the
traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word,
wholly Mexicanised.
Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost
entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless
paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally
penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy.
Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen
a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and
getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper. The very
storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more
surprised than pleased when they are offered. They fear there must
be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom
from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer
begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my
purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case,
partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition
which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit
for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this
villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian
nature. I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers
of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in
many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it
in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences. Jew
storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from
this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and
keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the
mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except
that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans
bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly
bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like
certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the
race that holds and tills it for the moment.
In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County.
The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain
under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character.
The land is held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which
are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief
danger and disgrace of California; and the holders are mostly of
American or British birth. We have here in England no idea of the
troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these
large landholders - land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers,
they are more commonly and plainly called. Thus the townlands of
Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How they came there
is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man
is hated with a great hatred. His life has been repeatedly in
danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and
examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen
thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they
say, he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter
sent him warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly
pointed out for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney.
Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word of
explanation is required for English readers. Originally an Irish
dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost
dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there for six months
or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was
first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San
Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own ruin
by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and
had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of
the hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the
top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-
cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-
thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to
"hang David Jacks." Had the town been American, in my private
opinion, this would have been done years ago. Land is a subject on
which there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend
the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles
with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-
Wesson convenient to his hand.
On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old
friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year
in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all
consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable
service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice
in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those
typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the
success of the demagogue Kearney.
In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the
praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The
valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley,
bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills.
The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river,
loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a
quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill.
From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean,
and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers
on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of
the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the
converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes
and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily
widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim
to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse
have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference,
save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for
pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected.
Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the
neighbouring American proprietor, and with that exception no man
troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the
year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the PADRE drives over the hill
from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered
portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the
service; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses
contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among
a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God
served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other
temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years
of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet
they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce
the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they
sang. The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and
staccato. "In saecula saeculoho-horum," they went, with a vigorous
aspirate to every additional syllable. I have never seen faces
more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian
singers. It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by
which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides
an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was
united and expressed. And it made a man's heart sorry for the good
fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and
to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away
from all authority and influence in that land - to be succeeded by
greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing
may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the
Society of Jesus.
But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I
say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last
year exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by
the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table.
Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live
oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in
the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and
fashion. Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to
resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor,
quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a
lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.
[1880]
CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS
I
THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that
people love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air,
the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of
tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves -
these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre.
The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the
shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle
and not fear the "blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth,
lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very
essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling
forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the
plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the
ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and
healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness
and hysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladly
conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their
age.
The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this
country to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood
there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great
art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose
modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients. It was
chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art,
of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales
and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all
speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love
of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-
side primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris. And
for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France
scenery incomparable for romance and harmony. Provence, and the
valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of
masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is not merely
beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises
while it charms. Here you shall see castellated towns that would
befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like
cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers
of every precious colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by
the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the
modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him;
even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered.
But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to
paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell
among graceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery,
is classically graceful; and though the student may look for
different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate
his hand and eye.
But, before all its other advantages - charm, loveliness, or
proximity to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already
colonised. The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time
and tact. The population must be conquered. The innkeeper has to
be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he
must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in
a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours
and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers
who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy
tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour
merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given
to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should
find himself alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties
overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the
bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is the
crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing,
they not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of
their long purses, they will have undone the education of the
innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor
painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not here, O
Apollo!" will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day,
St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying
are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair;
like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his
chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs.
Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and credit are
not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously.
Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek
expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as
he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at
home. And when that essentially modern creature, the English or
American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns
as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself
defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French respectability,
quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls were
painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he
hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.
This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist.
The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its
crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part,
when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the
necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman,
is excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment,
to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least,
the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many
painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the
intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely
indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence
of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and
last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to
publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading
of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the
painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature,
is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material
as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second
stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully;
that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really
grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business
of real art - to give life to abstractions and significance and
charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his
fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest in the
childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone
can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard,
this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting
of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on.
They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great
picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade
him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his
style falsified for life.
And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any
art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small
successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported;
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he
come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows
letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a
man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon
his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation.
This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone: above
all with painters. They have made so many studies that it has
become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with
them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist
villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to
call them "Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the society
of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of
humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or
philosophy, are the means of treatment. It will be time enough to
think of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch
it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the
painters' village. "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education;
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being
forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.
Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the
very air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision,
clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in
the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be
acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least
the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this
technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city and awake next
day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals. The
same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys
and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty
in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be
decorative in its emptiness.
II
In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of
Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western
side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well
enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without
some special character and charm. Such quarters, for instance, as
the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a
hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the
silence of the birds. The two last are really conterminous; and in
both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand
political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the
air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In
the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock
lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper
slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the
great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a
grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos.
Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of
the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road conceived for pageantry
and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of
glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves,
and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen
far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon
one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a
little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and
heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine
trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be
forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a
hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an
unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing;
and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with
the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance.
There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the
glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant
darkness of the wood.
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