The Genius (27 page)

The exhibition which followed in April was one of those things
which happen to fortunate souls—a complete flowering out before the
eyes of the world of its feelings, emotions, perceptions, and
understanding. We all have our feelings and emotions, but lack the
power of self-expression. It is true, the work and actions of any
man are to some degree expressions of character, but this is a
different thing. The details of most lives are not held up for
public examination at any given time. We do not see succinctly in
any given place just what an individual thinks and feels. Even the
artist is not always or often given the opportunity of collected
public expression under conspicuous artistic auspices. Some are so
fortunate—many are not. Eugene realized that fortune was showering
its favors upon him.

When the time came, M. Charles was so kind as to send for the
pictures and to arrange all the details. He had decided with Eugene
that because of the vigor of treatment and the prevailing color
scheme black frames would be the best. The principal exhibition
room on the ground floor in which these paintings were to be hung
was heavily draped in red velvet and against this background the
different pictures stood out effectively. Eugene visited the show
room at the time the pictures were being hung, with Angela, with
Smite and MacHugh, Shotmeyer and others. He had long since notified
Norma Whitmore and Miriam Finch, but not the latter until after
Wheeler had had time to tell her. This also chagrined her, for she
felt in this as she had about his marriage, that he was purposely
neglecting her.

The dream finally materialized—a room eighteen by forty, hung
with dark red velvet, irradiated with a soft, illuminating glow
from hidden lamps in which Eugene's pictures stood forth in all
their rawness and reality—almost as vigorous as life itself. To
some people, those who do not see life clearly and directly, but
only through other people's eyes, they seemed more so.

For this reason Eugene's exhibition of pictures was an
astonishing thing to most of those who saw it. It concerned phases
of life which in the main they had but casually glanced at, things
which because they were commonplace and customary were supposedly
beyond the pale of artistic significance. One picture in
particular, a great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal
man, his ears thick and projecting, his lips fat, his nose flat,
his cheek bones prominent, his whole body expressing brute strength
and animal indifference to dirt and cold, illustrated this point
particularly. He was standing in a cheap, commonplace East Side
street. The time evidently was a January or February morning. His
business was driving an ash cart, and his occupation at the moment
illustrated by the picture was that of lifting a great can of mixed
ashes, paper and garbage to the edge of the ungainly iron wagon.
His hands were immense and were covered with great red patched
woolen and leather gloves—dirty, bulbous, inconvenient, one would
have said. His head and ears were swaddled about by a red flannel
shawl or strip of cloth which was knotted under his pugnacious
chin, and his forehead, shawl and all, surmounted by a brown canvas
cap with his badge and number as a garbage driver on it. About his
waist was tied a great piece of rough coffee sacking and his arms
and legs looked as though he might have on two or three pairs of
trousers and as many vests. He was looking purblindly down the
shabby street, its hard crisp snow littered with tin cans, paper,
bits of slop and offal. Dust—gray ash dust, was flying from his
upturned can. In the distance behind him was a milk wagon, a few
pedestrians, a little thinly clad girl coming out of a delicatessen
store. Over head were dull small-paned windows, some shutters with
a few of their slats broken out, a frowsy headed man looking out
evidently to see whether the day was cold.

Eugene was so cruel in his indictment of life. He seemed to lay
on his details with bitter lack of consideration. Like a
slavedriver lashing a slave he spared no least shade of his cutting
brush. "Thus, and thus and thus" (he seemed to say) "is it." "What
do you think of this? and this? and this?"

People came and stared. Young society matrons, art dealers, art
critics, the literary element who were interested in art, some
musicians, and, because the newspapers made especial mention of it,
quite a number of those who run wherever they imagine there is
something interesting to see. It was quite a notable two weeks'
display. Miriam Finch (though she never admitted to Eugene that she
had seen it—she would not give him that satisfaction) Norma
Whitmore, William McConnell, Louis Deesa, Owen Overman, Paynter
Stone, the whole ruck and rabble of literary and artistic life,
came. There were artists of great ability there whom Eugene had
never seen before. It would have pleased him immensely if he had
chanced to see several of the city's most distinguished social
leaders looking, at one time and another, at his pictures. All his
observers were astonished at his virility, curious as to his
personality, curious as to what motive, or significance, or point
of view it might have. The more eclectically cultured turned to the
newspapers to see what the art critics would say of this—how they
would label it. Because of the force of the work, the dignity and
critical judgment of Kellner and Son, the fact that the public of
its own instinct and volition was interested, most of the
criticisms were favorable. One art publication, connected with and
representative of the conservative tendencies of a great publishing
house, denied the merit of the collection as a whole, ridiculed the
artist's insistence on shabby details as having artistic merit,
denied that he could draw accurately, denied that he was a lover of
pure beauty, and accused him of having no higher ideal than that of
desire to shock the current mass by painting brutal things
brutally.

"Mr. Witla," wrote this critic, "would no doubt be flattered if
he were referred to as an American Millet. The brutal exaggeration
of that painter's art would probably testify to him of his own
merit. He is mistaken. The great Frenchman was a lover of humanity,
a reformer in spirit, a master of drawing and composition. There
was nothing of this cheap desire to startle and offend by what he
did. If we are to have ash cans and engines and broken-down
bus-horses thrust down our throats as art, Heaven preserve us. We
had better turn to commonplace photography at once and be done with
it. Broken window shutters, dirty pavements, half frozen ash cart
drivers, overdrawn, heavily exaggerated figures of policemen,
tenement harridans, beggars, panhandlers, sandwich men—of such is
Art
according to Eugene Witla."

Eugene winced when he read this. For the time being it seemed
true enough. His art was shabby. Yet there were others like Luke
Severas who went to the other extreme.

"A true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the
ability to endow color—not with its photographic value, though to
the current thought it may seem so—but with its higher spiritual
significance; the ability to indict life with its own grossness, to
charge it prophetically with its own meanness and cruelty in order
that mayhap it may heal itself; the ability to see wherein is
beauty—even in shame and pathos and degradation; of such is this
man's work. He comes from the soil apparently, fresh to a great
task. There is no fear here, no bowing to traditions, no
recognition of any of the accepted methods. It is probable that he
may not know what the accepted methods are. So much the better. We
have a new method. The world is the richer for that. As we have
said before, Mr. Witla may have to wait for his recognition. It is
certain that these pictures will not be quickly purchased and hung
in parlors. The average art lover does not take to a new thing so
readily. But if he persevere, if his art does not fail him, his
turn will come. It cannot fail. He is a great artist. May he live
to realize it consciously and in his own soul."

Tears leaped to Eugene's eyes when he read this. The thought
that he was a medium for some noble and super-human purpose
thickened the cords in his throat until they felt like a lump. He
wanted to be a great artist, he wanted to be worthy of the
appreciation that was thus extended to him. He thought of all the
writers and artists and musicians and connoisseurs of pictures who
would read this and remember him. It was just possible that from
now onwards some of his pictures would sell. He would be so glad to
devote himself to this sort of thing—to quit magazine illustration
entirely. How ridiculous the latter was, how confined and
unimportant. Henceforth, unless driven by sheer necessity, he would
do it no more. They should beg in vain. He was an artist in the
true sense of the word—a great painter, ranking with Whistler,
Sargent, Velasquez and Turner. Let the magazines with their little
ephemeral circulation go their way. He was for the whole world.

He stood at the window of his studio one day while the
exhibition was still in progress, Angela by his side, thinking of
all the fine things that had been said. No picture had been sold,
but M. Charles had told him that some might be taken before it was
all over.

"I think if I make any money out of this," he said to Angela,
"we will go to Paris this summer. I have always wanted to see
Paris. In the fall we'll come back and take a studio up town. They
are building some dandy ones up in Sixty-fifth Street." He was
thinking of the artists who could pay three and four thousand
dollars a year for a studio. He was thinking of men who made four,
five, six and even eight hundred dollars out of every picture they
painted. If he could do that! Or if he could get a contract for a
mural decoration for next winter. He had very little money laid by.
He had spent most of his time this winter working with these
pictures.

"Oh, Eugene," exclaimed Angela, "it seems so wonderful. I can
hardly believe it. You a really, truly, great artist! And us going
to Paris! Oh, isn't that beautiful. It seems like a dream. I think
and think, but it's hard to believe that I am here sometimes, and
that your pictures are up at Kellner's and oh!—" she clung to him
in an ecstasy of delight.

Out in the park the leaves were just budding. It looked as
though the whole square were hung with a transparent green net,
spangled, as was the net in his room, with tiny green leaves.
Songsters were idling in the sun. Sparrows were flying noisily
about in small clouds. Pigeons were picking lazily between the car
tracks of the street below.

"I might get a group of pictures illustrative of Paris. You
can't tell what we'll find. Charles says he will have another
exhibition for me next spring, if I'll get the material ready." He
pushed his arms above his head and yawned deliciously.

He wondered what Miss Finch thought now. He wondered where
Christina Channing was. There was never a word in the papers yet as
to what had become of her. He knew what Norma Whitmore thought. She
was apparently as happy as though the exhibition had been her
own.

"Well, I must go and get your lunch, Honeybun!" exclaimed
Angela. "I have to go to Mr. Gioletti, the grocer, and to Mr.
Ruggiere, the vegetable man." She laughed, for the Italian names
amused her.

Eugene went back to his easel. He was thinking of
Christina—where was she? At that moment, if he had known, she was
looking at his pictures, only newly returned from Europe. She had
seen a notice in the
Evening Post
.

"Such work!" Christina thought, "such force! Oh, what a
delightful artist. And he was with me."

Her mind went back to Florizel and the amphitheatre among the
trees. "He called me 'Diana of the Mountains,'" she thought, "his
'hamadryad,' his 'huntress of the morn.'" She knew he was married.
An acquaintance of hers had written in December. The past was past
with her—she wanted no more of it. But it was beautiful to think
upon—a delicious memory.

"What a queer girl I am," she thought.

Still she wished she could see him again—not face to face, but
somewhere where he could not see her. She wondered if he was
changing—if he would ever change. He was so beautiful then—to
her.

Paris now loomed bright in Eugene's imagination, the prospect
mingling with a thousand other delightful thoughts. Now that he had
attained to the dignity of a public exhibition, which had been
notably commented upon by the newspapers and art journals and had
been so generally attended by the elect, artists, critics, writers
generally, seemed to know of him. There were many who were anxious
to meet and greet him, to speak approvingly of his work. It was
generally understood, apparently, that he was a great artist, not
exactly arrived to the fullness of his stature as yet, being so
new, but on his way. Among those who knew him he was, by this one
exhibition, lifted almost in a day to a lonely height, far above
the puny efforts of such men as Smite and MacHugh, McConnell and
Deesa, the whole world of small artists whose canvases packed the
semi-annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design and the
Water color society, and with whom in a way, he had been
associated. He was a great artist now—recognized as such by the
eminent critics who knew; and as such, from now on, would be
expected to do the work of a great artist. One phrase in the
criticisms of Luke Severas in the
Evening Sun
as it
appeared during the run of his exhibition remained in his memory
clearly—"If he perseveres, if his art does not fail him." Why
should his art fail him?—he asked himself. He was immensely pleased
to hear from M. Charles at the close of the exhibition that three
of his pictures had been sold—one for three hundred dollars to
Henry McKenna, a banker; another, the East Side street scene which
M. Charles so greatly admired, to Isaac Wertheim, for five hundred
dollars; a third, the one of the three engines and the railroad
yard, to Robert C. Winchon, a railroad man, first vice-president of
one of the great railroads entering New York, also for five hundred
dollars. Eugene had never heard of either Mr. McKenna or Mr.
Winchon, but he was assured that they were men of wealth and
refinement. At Angela's suggestion he asked M. Charles if he would
not accept one of his pictures as a slight testimony of his
appreciation for all he had done for him. Eugene would not have
thought to do this, he was so careless and unpractical. But Angela
thought of it, and saw that he did it. M. Charles was greatly
pleased, and took the picture of Greeley Square, which he
considered a masterpiece of color interpretation. This somehow
sealed the friendship between these two, and M. Charles was anxious
to see Eugene's interests properly forwarded. He asked him to leave
three of his scenes on sale for a time and he would see what he
could do. Meanwhile, Eugene, with thirteen hundred added to the
thousand and some odd dollars he had left in his bank from previous
earnings, was convinced that his career was made, and decided, as
he had planned to go to Paris, for the summer at least.

This trip, so exceptional to him, so epoch-making, was easily
arranged. All the time he had been in New York he had heard more in
his circle of Paris than of any other city. Its streets, its
quarters, its museums, its theatres and opera were already almost a
commonplace to him. The cost of living, the ideal methods of
living, the way to travel, what to see—how often he had sat and
listened to descriptions of these things. Now he was going. Angela
took the initiative in arranging all the practical details—such as
looking up the steamship routes, deciding on the size of trunks
required, what to take, buying the tickets, looking up the rates of
the different hotels and pensions at which they might possibly
stay. She was so dazed by the glory that had burst upon her
husband's life that she scarcely knew what to do or what to make of
it.

"That Mr. Bierdat," she said to Eugene, referring to one of the
assistant steam-ship agents with whom she had taken counsel, "tells
me that if we are just going for the summer it's foolish to take
anything but absolute necessaries. He says we can buy so many nice
little things to wear over there if we need them, and then I can
bring them back duty free in the fall."

Eugene approved of this. He thought Angela would like to see the
shops. They finally decided to go via London, returning direct from
Havre, and on the tenth of May they departed, arriving in London a
week later and in Paris on the first of June. Eugene was greatly
impressed with London. He had arrived in time to miss the British
damp and cold and to see London through a golden haze which was
entrancing. Angela objected to the shops, which she described as
"punk," and to the condition of the lower classes, who were so poor
and wretchedly dressed. She and Eugene discussed the interesting
fact that all Englishmen looked exactly alike, dressed, walked, and
wore their hats and carried their canes exactly alike. Eugene was
impressed with the apparent "go" of the men—their smartness and
dapperness. The women he objected to in the main as being dowdy and
homely and awkward.

But when he reached Paris, what a difference! In London, because
of the lack of sufficient means (he did not feel that as yet he had
sufficient to permit him to indulge in the more expensive comforts
and pleasures of the city) and for the want of someone to provide
him with proper social introductions, he was compelled to content
himself with that superficial, exterior aspect of things which only
the casual traveler sees—the winding streets, the crush of traffic,
London Tower, Windsor Castle, the Inns of court, the Strand,
Piccadilly, St. Paul's and, of course, the National Gallery and the
British Museum. South Kensington and all those various endowed
palaces where objects of art are displayed pleased him greatly. In
the main he was struck with the conservatism of London, its
atmosphere of Empire, its soldiery and the like, though he
considered it drab, dull, less strident than New York, and really
less picturesque. When he came to Paris, however, all this was
changed. Paris is of itself a holiday city—one whose dress is
always gay, inviting, fresh, like one who sets forth to spend a day
in the country. As Eugene stepped onto the dock at Calais and later
as he journeyed across and into the city, he could feel the vast
difference between France and England. The one country seemed
young, hopeful, American, even foolishly gay, the other serious,
speculative, dour.

Eugene had taken a number of letters from M. Charles, Hudson
Dula, Louis Deesa, Leonard Baker and others, who, on hearing that
he was going, had volunteered to send him to friends in Paris who
might help him. The principal thing, if he did not wish to maintain
a studio of his own, and did wish to learn, was to live with some
pleasant French family where he could hear French and pick it up
quickly. If he did not wish to do this, the next best thing was to
settle in the Montmartre district in some section or court where he
could obtain a nice studio, and where there were a number of
American or English students. Some of the Americans to whom he had
letters were already domiciled here. With a small calling list of
friends who spoke English he would do very well.

"You will be surprised, Witla," said Deesa to him one day, "how
much English you can get understood by making intelligent
signs."

Eugene had laughed at Deesa's descriptions of his own
difficulties and successes, but he found that Deesa was right.
Signs went very far and they were, as a rule, thoroughly
intelligible.

The studio which he and Angela eventually took after a few days
spent at an hotel, was a comfortable one on the third floor of a
house which Eugene found ready to his hand, recommended by M.
Arkquin, of the Paris branch of Kellner and Son. Another artist,
Finley Wood, whom afterwards Eugene recalled as having been
mentioned to him by Ruby Kenny, in Chicago, was leaving Paris for
the summer. Because of M. Charles' impressive letter, M. Arkquin
was most anxious that Eugene should be comfortably installed and
suggested that he take this, the charge being anything he cared to
pay—forty francs the month. Eugene looked at it and was delighted.
It was in the back of the house, looking out on a little garden,
and because of a westward slope of the ground from this direction
and an accidental breach in the building line, commanded a wide
sweep of the city of Paris, the twin towers of Notre Dame, the
sheer rise of the Eiffel tower. It was fascinating to see the
lights of the city blinking of an evening. Eugene would invariably
draw his chair close to his favorite window when he came in, while
Angela made lemonade or iced tea or practised her culinary art on a
chafing dish. In presenting to him an almost standard American menu
she exhibited the executive ability and natural industry which was
her chief characteristic. She would go to the neighboring
groceries, rotisseries, patisseries, green vegetable stands, and
get the few things she needed in the smallest quantities, always
selecting the best and preparing them with the greatest care. She
was an excellent cook and loved to set a dainty and shining table.
She saw no need of company, for she was perfectly happy alone with
Eugene and felt that he must be with her. She had no desire to go
anywhere by herself—only with him; and she would hang on every
thought and motion waiting for him to say what his pleasure would
be.

The wonder of Paris to Eugene was its freshness and the richness
of its art spirit as expressed on every hand. He was never weary of
looking at the undersized French soldiery with their wide red
trousers, blue coats and red caps, or the police with their capes
and swords and the cab drivers with their air of leisurely
superiority. The Seine, brisk with boats at this season of the
year, the garden of the Tuileries, with its white marble nudes and
formal paths and stone benches, the Bois, the Champ de Mars, the
Trocadero Museum, the Louvre—all the wonder streets and museums
held him as in a dream.

"Gee," he exclaimed to Angela one afternoon as he followed the
banks of the Seine toward Issy, "this is certainly the home of the
blessed for all good artists. Smell that perfume. (It was from a
perfume factory in the distance.) See that barge!" He leaned on the
river wall. "Ah," he sighed, "this is perfect."

They went back in the dusk on the roof of an open car. "When I
die," he sighed, "I hope I come to Paris. It is all the heaven I
want."

Yet like all perfect delights, it lost some of its savour after
a time, though not much. Eugene felt that he could live in Paris if
his art would permit him—though he must go back, he knew, for the
present anyhow.

Angela, he noticed after a time, was growing in confidence, if
not in mentality. From a certain dazed uncertainty which had
characterized her the preceding fall when she had first come to New
York, heightened and increased for the time being by the rush of
art life and strange personalities she had encountered there and
here she was blossoming into a kind of assurance born of
experience. Finding that Eugene's ideas, feelings and interests
were of the upper world of thought entirely—concerned with types,
crowds, the aspect of buildings, streets, skylines, the humors and
pathetic aspects of living, she concerned herself solely with the
managerial details. It did not take her long to discover that if
anyone would relieve Eugene of all care for himself he would let
him do it. It was no satisfaction to him to buy himself anything.
He objected to executive and commercial details. If tickets had to
be bought, time tables consulted, inquiries made, any labor of
argument or dispute engaged in, he was loath to enter on it. "You
get these, will you, Angela?" he would plead, or "you see him about
that. I can't now. Will you?"

Angela would hurry to the task, whatever it was, anxious to show
that she was of real use and necessity. On the busses of London or
Paris, as in New York, he was sketching, sketching, sketching—cabs,
little passenger boats of the Seine, characters in the cafes,
parks, gardens, music halls, anywhere, anything, for he was
practically tireless. All that he wanted was not to be bothered
very much, to be left to his own devices. Sometimes Angela would
pay all the bills for him for a day. She carried his purse, took
charge of all the express orders into which their cash had been
transferred, kept a list of all their expenditures, did the
shopping, buying, paying. Eugene was left to see the thing that he
wanted to see, to think the things that he wanted to think. During
all those early days Angela made a god of him and he was very
willing to cross his legs, Buddha fashion, and act as one.

Only at night when there were no alien sights or sounds to
engage his attention, when not even his art could come between
them, and she could draw him into her arms and submerge his
restless spirit in the tides of her love did she feel his
equal—really worthy of him. These transports which came with the
darkness, or with the mellow light of the little oil lamp that hung
in chains from the ceiling near their wide bed, or in the faint
freshness of dawn with the birds cheeping in the one tree of the
little garden below—were to her at once utterly generous and
profoundly selfish. She had eagerly absorbed Eugene's philosophy of
self-indulgent joy where it concerned themselves—all the more
readily as it coincided with her own vague ideas and her own hot
impulses.

Angela had come to marriage through years of self-denial, years
of bitter longing for the marriage that perhaps would never be, and
out of those years she had come to the marriage bed with a
cumulative and intense passion. Without any knowledge either of the
ethics or physiology of sex, except as pertained to her state as a
virgin, she was vastly ignorant of marriage itself; the hearsay of
girls, the equivocal confessions of newly married women, and the
advice of her elder sister (conveyed by Heaven only knows what
process of conversation) had left her almost as ignorant as before,
and now she explored its mysteries with abandon, convinced that the
unrestrained gratification of passion was normal and excellent—in
addition to being, as she came to find, a universal solvent for all
differences of opinion or temperament that threatened their peace
of mind. Beginning with their life in the studio on Washington
Square, and continuing with even greater fervor now in Paris, there
was what might be described as a prolonged riot of indulgence
between them, bearing no relation to any necessity in their
natures, and certainly none to the demands which Eugene's
intellectual and artistic tasks laid upon him. She was to Eugene
astonishing and delightful; and yet perhaps not so much delightful
as astonishing. Angela was in a sense elemental, but Eugene was
not: he was the artist, in this as in other things, rousing himself
to a pitch of appreciation which no strength so undermined by
intellectual subtleties could continuously sustain. The excitement
of adventure, of intrigue in a sense, of discovering the secrets of
feminine personality—these were really what had constituted the
charm, if not the compelling urge, of his romances. To conquer was
beautiful: but it was in essence an intellectual enterprise. To see
his rash dreams come true in the yielding of the last sweetness
possessed by the desired woman, had been to him imaginatively as
well as physically an irresistible thing. But these enterprises
were like thin silver strands spun out across an abyss, whose
beauty but not whose dangers were known to him. Still, he rejoiced
in this magnificent creature-joy which Angela supplied; it was, so
far as it was concerned, what he thought he wanted. And Angela
interpreted her power to respond to what seemed his inexhaustible
desire as not only a kindness but a duty.