Across The Plains

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In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as
your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each
vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that
hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers
and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in
the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if
with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint,
has countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you
are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,
to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the
aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a
wilderness; it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre
of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the midst, a little
mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure;
and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled by historic
names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless
humbug who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by
the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner
of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the
romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of
sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of
his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his perfect
wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a
great avidity. In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-
stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he
was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would
seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places
still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten,
and that lie unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows
waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the
corner of a rock. But your security from interruption is complete;
you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul
suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have
committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could
still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and
chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate
landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he
would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;
and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated
quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the
immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests. And
the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented
inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the
companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination
vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;
others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem
but an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the
plain man it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a
good whet for company.

III

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; ET EGO IN ARCADIA
VIXI, it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying
close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many
others, a green spot in memory. The great Millet was just dead,
the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters
were in mourning. The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in
the history of art: in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the
history of the Latin Quarter. The PETIT CENACLE was dead and
buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest
from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly
lost; and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a
sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators. But
if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still
farther expurgated; honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I
have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest
painter to depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his
bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English and
Americans alone. At the same time, the great influx of Anglo-
Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious. There had
been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and the
Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It
would be well if nations and races could communicate their
qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they
have an eye to nothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentially
dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we
call "Fair Play." The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his
guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired over-seas and
left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil
were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a
shrug expressed his judgment upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi
bore rule at Gretz - urbane, superior rule - his memory rich in
anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories;
sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath
these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye
scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way
on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had Pelouse, the
admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a
full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples,
bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all
admired. Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne.
Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless
commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day
made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it. The good
Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before
that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely
death. He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would
never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance
still haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another - whom I will
not name - has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of
his decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then;
but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain
stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room,
the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing
battle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy,
still waiting the return of fortune. But these days also were too
good to last; and the former favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I
heard the truth, by night. There was a time when he was counted a
great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of
time brings in his revenges! To pity Millet is a piece of
arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it
is harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may
pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to
opulence and momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was
suffered step by step to sink again to nothing. No misfortune can
exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost progress, even bravely
supported as it was; but to those also who were taken early from
the easel, a regret is due. From all the young men of this period,
one stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of
fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities. "Il faut faire de la
peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience
had continued his education, if he had been granted health to
return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must
believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy
principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from
wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped
yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden
with beer or wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there
was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a
computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying
share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric: ESTRATS.
Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your
bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your
disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your
coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest. The doves had
perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the
threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest.
Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the
interminable field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream
and wander. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal
awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of your accommodation, set
aside that varying item of the ESTRALS, cost you five francs a day;
your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were
out of luck's way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave
it pending.

IV

Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it
was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so
doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside,
essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival
had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined
observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as
dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch
of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were
as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people
driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words
what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown
themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had
pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they wanted tact to
appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette. And once
they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its
cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of
our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose
exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from
the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were
never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I
believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this,
that they were never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers,
singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky,
and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into
the spirit of the association. This singular society is purely
French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French
defects. It cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, the
impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent
friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a
commonwealth. But this random gathering of young French painters,
with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life
of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their
etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their
edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder the more
at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre. This
inbred civility - to use the word in its completest meaning - this
natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all
that is required to make a governable nation and a just and
prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of
laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who
joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their
companions. We returned from long stations in the fortifying air,
our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the
silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we
fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn
chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles
guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into
the night. It was a good place and a good life for any naturally-
minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps
best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was saturated in
this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing
currents of the world, he might forget that there existed other and
more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place, it
was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience,
like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw
himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were
really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health
and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became
tormented with the desire to work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness
full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among
companions; and still floating like music through his brain,
foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have
conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words
that were alive with import. So in youth, like Moses from the
mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we
shall never enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of
style that repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-
throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before
the artist can be born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of
glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in
comparison. We were all artists; almost all in the age of
illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the
strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were
happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though
these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others
succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the
amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House
Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

V

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts
a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many
sterlings. And the bridge is a piece of public property;
anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettante from the
walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen it in the Salon; I
have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in the last French
Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white by
Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the
MAGAZINE OF ART. Long-suffering bridge! And if you visit Gretz
to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom
of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly
painting it again.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than
Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. There is something
ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn
tables standing in one corner, as though the stage were set for
rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking
their fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers. It
is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down the green inn-
garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see
the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals are laid in
the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and
bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside
the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is
"something to do" at Gretz. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can
recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration,
as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This
"something to do" is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it;
you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and
behold them gone! But Gretz is a merry place after its kind:
pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of its pellucid river,
whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the
navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the red berries
cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies, and
mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps
of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to
Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed
and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and
the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former
guests. They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall
the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and
the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the
material fabric is now dust; soon, with the last of its
inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn,
shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish
from the world of men. "For remembrance of the old house' sake,"
as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story. When the
tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left
stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over,
the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to
obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best,
sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals
were supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ.
Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them. But they
stood firm; eat they must, but having no money they would soil no
napkins.

VI

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been
little visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous; they
have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of
colonisation. Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I
never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed
himself there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his
friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green
country and to the music of the falling water. It was a most airy,
quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just too rustic to be
stagey; and from my memories of the place in general, and that
garden trellis in particular - at morning, visited by birds, or at
night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party - I am
inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny.
Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily
slumbering in the plain - the cemetery of itself. The great road
remains to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage
bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room
the paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago.
In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there. From time
to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the
glimpses of the moon, and after some communication with flesh and
blood return to his austere hermitage. But even he, when I last
revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the
roll of Chaillyites. It may revive - but I much doubt it. Acheres
and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question,
being merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or
the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side,
Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely know Marlotte,
and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it. It
seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie is
unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable
enough, is commonplace. Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I
were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

VII

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good
conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day. Many of
us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a
portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods. I would not
dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that
will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below
great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of youth's
dynamite and dear remembrances. And as one generation passes on
and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I entertain a
fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth into the forest
they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their
predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are the
sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the
field of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer
farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves,
surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions?
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our
delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a
legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this
memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital
memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life
richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed,
from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will
return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and
use it for ever in their books and pictures. Yet when they made
their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it
should seem, had been forgotten. A projection of themselves shall
appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural
child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares. Over the whole
field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like
indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all
beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously
unwilling to forget their orphanage. If anywhere about that wood
you meet my airy bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a
pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when it comes to your own
turn to quit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no
Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as
becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure,
the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that
has not been mirthfully conceived.

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket
and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of
enjoyment. Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to
Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit
of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from studies,
although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the
gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo
the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the
concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to
finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The
incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which
we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches
and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure.
Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid
works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less
shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions. In all
sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling
human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio
pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young
painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with
studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him
walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and
botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will learn - or
learn not to forget - the poetry of life and earth, which, when he
has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

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