In the emptiness left by his death I came to realize that one of the principal anticipations of my life had been looking forward to watch, year by year, the unfolding of his mind and the ripening of his powers. His talent had long since passed the stage at which it was a sporting proposition—the stage at which one could chaff him about cashing in heavily some day on a pair of "early Demmlers."
There was no kind of doubt that he carried within him the creative "daimon." His very instincts betrayed it. He went at a landscape the way Hugo Wolf went at a song: he lived with the poem before creating the music. For the first few days in a novel countryside he never thought of touching brush to canvas. He walked around in the scene, his every sense alert to its feature and color, to its sound and smell. He laid in wait for its moods. He eyed it in every circumstance of wind and weather, as if it had been a face he was preparing to paint, or a woman he was preparing to wed. No words. The quality he most appreciated in a companion at such times was silence. And it was entertainment enough to watch the play of expression in his face as his eyes roamed meadow, hill or sea horizon—vigilance, delight, eagerness, discriminating study, instructions to memory, brooding thought—his life was a perpetual honeymoon with nature for his bride.
Then would come the day and the hour when he was ready to paint. By that time, in the wealth of his materials, his only study would be not what to put in but what to leave out. I doubt if he had reached the point of knowingly causing his subconscious to work for him, but it will be apparent from the foregoing that he was doing so unconsciously.
He was able, somehow, to communicate his sense of form and color to another, without resort to speech, or with only the fewest words. Perhaps it was the stimulus of seeing how much there was for him in the distant shining of sunlight on winding waters, or a range of low hills scrawling their signature on the chill blue of horizon sky, which taught others to find the wonder and dignity in what they would once have looked on as commonplace. At any rate, I find myself, in all seasons, seeing landscapes through his eyes.... "Now that looks commonplace, but it isn't. Fritz would have seen something in these somber March-brown meadows drowned in the freshets of spring; these red-budding birches; this delicate flush of pink in a drab evening sky...." And so he, being dead, yet seeth.
He was well aware, by this time, that the artist who is not also a thinker is a one-legged man. He accepted the obligation of understanding matters which, superficially, might have seemed far outside his province. It was in 1915 that he encountered Tolstoy's great work on Christian anarchism, The Kingdom of God Is Within You. It revolutionized his view of life. It convinced him of the futility of violence as a method of settling disputes, personal or national. And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his own right.
Next he encountered Romain Rolland's Life of Michael Angelo. Far from being chilled by the classic austerity of that work, it warmed him. In it he found the food he had been seeking. He made it a part of him. It confirmed, with revelations of the laws of mental conduct which governed that giant of the Renaissance, principles which this young man had been formulating and practising by the naked instinct of his will to create. Things which he had been doing or forbearing to do, he could not have told you why, here received their sanction or veto in the experience of a genius.
Little as was said about this between us, it was easy to see how profoundly this discovery of the similarity between his own mental processes and those of a great master had strengthened his confidence in himself. Michael Angelo was added to the list of his Great Companions.
He had another. Rembrandt.
There was a gallery in London, which one I forget, which he visited day after day.
"In the first room you entered," said he, "was a portrait of an old woman by Rembrandt, painted in his last period. Time after time I went there intending to see the rest of the gallery. Sometimes I even tried a room or two. What was the use? I went back to that portrait. It seemed like a waste of time to look at the other pictures. Everything they said—if they said anything—was said in that portrait by Rembrandt and said better. It seemed to me as if the whole history of humanity were concentrated in that old woman's face.... Finally I surrendered and went only to see that."
There is a chastity of the mind, just as there is a chastity of the body. There are certain creative processes which a sincere thinker would no more reveal to casual eyes than he would strip in a public place. A rule of mental chastity: Do not hold promiscuous mental intercourse. The shallow would intrude into these austere places like picnickers in a sanctuary, littering it with their luncheon refuse. Let the artist raise his thought-stained face from his toil, smiling but mute.
Fritz guarded his secrets well. A sudden flash of arrested eye, a certain silent intentness of gaze, an interest in a subject which would seem altogether out of proportion to its importance, a look of perpetual expectancy were all that betrayed his search. He was learning, learning, learning: every hour, every minute. Sometimes for days together he would seem dormant—practical people would have said loafing—lazily absorbing impressions as it had been through his pores. Again he seemed to devour scenery, faces, books, ideas with an appetite that was insatiable.
A young sculptor, meeting Fritz, observed to me privately,
"What an unromantic exterior for an artist!"
The joke was too good to tell Fritz for, all innocently on the sculptor's part, it revealed a secret which I was not supposed to know: that Fritz instinctively cultivated this young-man-just-out-of-college-and-doing-well-in-business exterior as a high board fence behind which, free from intrusion, to train the muscles of his mind and cultivate the golden orchards of his soul.
He had to. For once he had mastered the tools of his trade there was absolutely no one to teach him the things he most needed to know. He must go it alone. He knew it. And he was going. That was the secret of the watchful, hungry look of him—the look of one aware of a ravenous appetite and never sure of his next meal. That was the secret of his inarticulate gratitude to anyone who happened to be able to put him in the way of finding the food his spirit craved. He discovered that the composers knew more about painting than most painters, and he used to turn up at Symphony concerts or at the opera with the look of a small boy fresh from a session with the jam pot behind the pantry door. He wasn't saying anything, but you knew that he'd got it. He made a bee-line for Beethoven and Wagner. He came away after a performance of Tristan most divinely drunk on the strongest wine in music.
For the method of these composers was the method which he had chosen for himself unconsciously. He was not satisfied to write a thin melody. He was determined to teach his brush the rich and complicated instrumentation of an orchestral score. Not this face or that landscape was what he planned to put on canvas, but the abundance of life which he had absorbed through every avenue of sense. Not a violin alone, nothing less than the full orchestra would content him.
I ask myself whether I shall ever see anything more inspiriting than the quiet, secret quest of this young man for an excellence and a mastery not only unrecognized and unrewarded by the social order in which he lived, but not even comprehended. This is the courage of the creative mind: that it is prepared to meet alike its triumph or its defeat in an utter moral solitude. Stories of the physical courage which Fritz displayed on the field of battle were to come later.... Which is likely to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on earth more speedily—the courage of the body, to destroy; or the courage of the mind, to create?
Is all this too eulogistic? "Oh, come! He must have had faults, weaknesses, common spots." ... I suppose so. To tell the truth I never noticed them. There was a trait, as I first remember him, of too ready assent to the opinions of others which it amused me to attribute to peasant ancestry; but, after all, that conformity was only outward and it soon disappeared. In matters really vital to him his will was granite and he commanded a silence which could vociferate "Hands off!"
His very inarticulate tongue gave promise of greatness. One saw all this life-stuff entering into him. He could never express it in speech. It was a necessity of his being to express it somehow. It would have to come out on canvas.
Oh, once in a great while the curtain would be dropped. Some lucky turn of conversation would relax the inhibitions and liberate his tongue. Then for a few minutes, perhaps for an hour, one would be shown the treasure house within. What shall I say of those glimpses? There are times to walk fearfully lest one smash something which cannot be replaced, and these occasions were of them. Treasures not of this world; possessions which honored the possessor by being held in honor; bins heaped, as it had been, with jewels and brocades; others which gaped with a sacrificial emptiness; spaces eked out with the heroic poverty of one dedicated to the monasticism of a creative career.
Enough.... I saw—what I saw.
And withal he was half pagan. The physical gratification with which he drank in the beauty of the world reminded me of that statuette by Roderick Hudson, Δίψος ("Thirst")—a boy, feet planted wide apart, head thrown back, slaking his throat out of a gourd held in both hands. Fritz was that boy. The ugliness of modern clothes disgusted him. He was alert for chances to take off his own: impromptu baths in cold brooks on walking trips, or long days of summer sunshine on lonely stretches of sea beach with gleaming yellow sands. There was some place among the mountains of West Virginia where he used to go: ledges of flat rock above a rushing river. All day long they gathered warmth from the sun, retaining it well into the night. When the moon had risen he loved to steal away for a plunge in the river, then lie out naked in the moonlight on these great slabs of warm rock, alone with the magic night.
VIII
In May, 1917, he came to Boston from Pittsburgh. I was in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He came there.
Conscription impended. Under his composure the struggle was going on. Tolstoy had converted him. What was he to do?
"If there were no one but myself to consider...," said he, "But the suffering which you would have no hesitation in imposing on yourself you hesitate to impose on those dearer to you than yourself."
He was thrilled by the nonresistance of the still-young Russian revolution:
"Wonderful people, liberated by their refusal to kill! They fold their arms and say 'Shoot!' The Cossacks refuse to shoot them. And a despotism, centuries old, comes tumbling down. It proves everything that Tolstoy has said."
For three days, tramping about the scrubby countryside, rambling along the banks of the Ohio, rowing up the swift, muddy current of the Kanawah, the dilemma of a man born to create and commandeered to destroy was threshed out. Never before had he spoken so freely. The economic causes of the trouble he understood fairly well, but it was startling with what a seeing eye he pierced the illusions which beset that time. By that faculty of divination peculiar to the artist's mind he reached, at one leap, conclusions which the thinker only arrives at after laborious effort. And he was a young man without an illusion left, steadfastly looking the ugliest facts of our social order in the face.
On the last evening of his stay we were standing on the steel spider web of a suspension bridge which spans the Ohio, watching a sunset unfurl its banners of blood and fire.
All day there had been thunder and rain, and eastward behind the towers and spires of the city skyline still hung the retreating clouds, sullen and dark. Fritz pointed to where, against that gloomy cloud bank, high above the city and gilded red from the setting sun, rose two symbols: one on the tip of a spire, the other on the staff atop a tower: cross and flag.
"Church," said he grimly, "and State."
The next day he returned to Pittsburgh to register for the draft.
July found me back in New England at a farm on the banks of the Merrimac in West Newbury. Returning one noon from an errand up the hills to the village I was hailed by the children with a shout:
"A friend of yours is here."
"Who is he?"
"He told us his name but we've forgotten it."
"What does he look like?"
Descriptions varied:
"He's awfully strong," said the boy.
"He has shiny black hair and black eyes," said the littlest girl.
"He wears his coat off and his sleeves rolled up," said the biggest little girl, and she added, with the spontaneous poetry of childhood, "And his hands are beeootiful!"
"Where is he?"
"Down by the river."
Under the maples, lying in the tall grass at the foot of a steep bank which sloped to the stream, with children clambering all over him, was Fritz. He scrambled to his feet and came forward putting out his hand with that awkwardness of meeting after an absence which he never quite outgrew, but his eyes snapped with enjoyment at my astonishment.
It appeared that he had been painting some one in a Massachusetts mill city and had dashed up here between-whiles.
There is a tiny hut perched like a brown owl on a knoll in a grove of hickories beside the river. To this hermitage we retired and he related the news of the intellectual underworld in Pittsburgh. Roger Baldwin had been there, much to his comfort. A friend whose portrait he had been painting, aware that the mildest radicalism had now become high treason, had remarked by way of chaffing him,
"I hope they give you a cell with a north light."
He unburdened with a tone of sheer physical relief:
"This frantic enthusiasm for 'democracy,'" said he, "on the part of people who have spent their whole lives combating it!"
He sat relaxed in a deep chair, hands hanging limp on its arms—hands large, strongly muscled, marked with heavy veins, the fingers full-fleshed at their tips, the skin bronzed by the sun.
Tatters of sunlight, reflected from the wavelets of the river obliquely up underneath the hickory boughs, flickered on the ceiling and walls of the hut.
Disillusioned he was, but not cynical. His humor was a bath to a sore spirit. He kindled, in the moral solitude of that hour, a little fire of faith and hope. It struck me anew, eyeing him as he sat there, what a beautiful creature he was, inside and out.
There was in him, too, an odd streak of stoicism. Keen as he was for "the eats," he delighted in little acts of self-discipline. That afternoon, it being necessary for me to try for a nap, he cleared out to gather views of river and woods. An hour later I discovered this young Spartan, hands clasped behind head, spine stretched along the plank flooring of the narrow ledge in front of the hut, sleeping quietly....
The next day he made himself everlastingly solid with the people at the farm by spending the whole morning fitting screens to the multitudinous doors and windows of their ark of a house. Everyone wanted Fritz to stay a month.
At nine that evening he left. As we trudged over the road in the warm darkness of the summer night, he talked soberly of the dubious future.
He was not called until the following April, 1918. Twice that winter he came to Boston. Number 94 Charles Street had been dismantled. But the third-floor-back on Pinckney Street received him with an extra cot for bivouac.
... This should have been the longest chapter of all, and the best. I find that I cannot write it.
Only a postscript. I asked him for a picture of himself.
"What do you want," he inquired, "a painting?"
My ideas had been far more modest:
"Beggars should not be choosers. I will take what I can get: painting, photograph, snap-shot: and be thankful."
"What size would you like?"
"Small enough so that it can go wherever I go."
He made no promises. His way was to wait until the time came and then let the performance speak.
Not three weeks later it came: a sketch in oils, head and shoulders, ten inches by twelve, not at all the cold greenish grays I had anticipated from his habitual attitude of self-effacement, but on the contrary a scheme of rich golden browns. He has painted his own portrait with the same reticence which looks out of its eyes. Strangers seeing it remark,
"What a striking face!"
His friends view it and say,
"He was much finer looking than that."
IX
The rest is seen dimly, as through a mist. His voice is heard, distinct and clear, but as from a great distance.
To Ralph Heard he writes from Camp Lee, Virginia:
"I am eating, sleeping, and drilling with physical enthusiasm," and later, "Tell the fellows that the dust is gathering on my palette."
A letter to me in May tells of taking his pipe at the day's end and strolling into the woods of the camp to be alone with the song of birds and tints of sunset. Late in July came a letter from France describing a march "between gleam of gold in the west and a rising full moon in the east, ... aëroplanes in action overhead and cannonading over the hills to the east." Then occurs this:
"I am little different from as you know me, even though now in a machine gun company:—Curious irony.—"
And this:
"Continue your work.... Other victories are transient."
And this was his farewell:
"We have seen great visions and dreamed splendid dreams. And the faith you have in me,—which I prize so desperately,—I have in you, no matter where each of us may be headed. We will live the best we can—that, through our friendship, is all we ask of each other."
On January 23, 1919, one of his brothers writes from Le Mans, France:
"St. Remis du Plain is the name of the little town where Fred's company was billeted. It is perched on the top of a hill in the middle of a vast plain and was visible for a long time as I headed towards it. This was the trip I had planned long ago, and pictured a happy meeting; however, it was decreed otherwise. Passing up the narrow street I saw 'Headquarters, 136 M. G. Bn.' written on the door of an old stone house. The orderly room was full of officers. I inquired for Lieut. Rew, the one who had previously written to me, and introduced myself as Fred's brother. The officer who was dictating stopped work, came over and shook hands with me. The captain commanding the battalion came from behind the table, greeted me and offered a word of sympathy. Soon all the officers were grouped about me and I saw that Fred was considered one of their number. The captain said, 'He was the best sergeant I ever had.' They invited me to mess with them, and Lieut. Rew said I was to bunk with him, 'for my men have cooties,' but I saw this was all done so that they might have a chance to speak of Fred. One of the sergeants told me that when the news came, the officers were even more broken up about it than the men.
"I was introduced to the noncoms with whom Fred seems to have been a favorite. In the evening, as we sat around an open fireplace, I asked if Fred had had a 'buddy.' The sergeant with whom Fred used to sleep said, 'No. He was everybody's friend.'
"As I was walking up to the kitchen, a private stepped out of the mess line and came up to me saying he knew me through my resemblance to Fred. Soon the mess line was demoralized and I was the center of a lively mass all talking at once and I could easily see why the captain recommended him so highly as a sergeant.—'He never said a harsh word,'—'He was always cheerful and never kicked,'—'When we complained about the feed or anything, he said it would be better later.' They talked so long that at last the cook asked me if I would not please eat so that they would eat and let him get through.
"The division left Camp Lee, June 21, 1918, and sailed from Newport News on the Italian transport Caserta. It was a dirty boat, the feed rotten, and the trip rough. Everybody was disgusted. Fred was about the only one of the company who never missed a meal. A private told me that he and Fred were standing at the rail in the bow of the ship one night talking about a number of things. This fellow voiced the sentiment of most of the company when he said he only wanted to make one more ocean trip and that was in the reverse direction. Fred looked far out across the water and remarked: 'I could stand a few more.'
"They landed at Brest on July 5 and entrained at once for Souville. They used the French type of compartment cars where with ten men and full equipment there wasn't much room to move about. Fred was in charge of his compartment and, with his usual ingenuity, devised means of disposing of the equipment to best advantage for their comfort. He also carefully arranged the daily menu consisting of bread, corned beef, tomatoes, beans, and jam. He did all this in such a serio-comic way that the fellows are still laughing over the memories of the trip.
"On September 20 the division led the drive into the Argonne forest. This is reputed to have been the hardest battle of the war in respect to the Germans' shell fire and the suffering caused by the rainy weather and lack of shelter. Through it all there was not a healthier nor more cheerful man than Fred. Recognized by the commanding officer as having 'the coolest head in the company and afraid of nothing' he was made a sergeant after this battle over the heads of some old National Guardsmen; but there was not a murmur—all were satisfied. When they came out of the woods he helped the doctor with the wounded (he seems to have helped everywhere, from the kitchen to the captain's private office). After they had all been attended to, he asked the doctor to look him over. He had received three flesh wounds in shoulder and arm. He picked out the pieces of shrapnel himself and had the doctor bandage him. After which he went about his work as usual.
"October 10 found the company in the St. Mihiel sector, and on October 22 it moved into Belgium. All this meant miles of weary hiking under a full pack; but Fred remained the same cheerful fellow as ever. He amused the whole company with his doings. He found an old hair-clipper among some salvage and immediately opened a barber shop where lieutenants as well as privates got their hair cut. Another thing that I recognized as characteristic were the remarks pertaining to his appetite. He never lost it. He was known to have 'eats' on his person all the time. He had a special knack of hunting out farm houses, engaging madame in conversation, and coming away with bread, eggs, or cheese in his knapsack. Occasionally he did some sketching and his letters were a joy to the lieutenant who censored them because of the excellent descriptions they contained....
"The company went over the top early in the morning of October 31. Fred was wounded in the left side by a piece of high explosive shell at about 5:30 a.m. It was before daylight and few knew he had been hit. When they did hear it, they were far in advance and Fred had been carried to Evacuation Hospital Number Five, at Staden, Belgium. He died there on November 2. One of the boys who helped carry him to the rear says that he was fully conscious despite the serious nature of his wound, and tells of how he directed them what to do—how he told them to leave him when the shells fell too fast (which they wouldn't do)—of how they left him, quite himself, at the first-aid station....
"He was never referred to as a bully or even as a fighter—he was spared the grewsome experience of hand-to-hand fighting, for from the first the Germans were in full flight; but he was remembered for his cheerfulness, his kindness toward others and especially for his lack of harsh words. His favorite text from the Bible was that part of the Sermon on the Mount known as the beatitudes, and he often wondered why ministers did not preach on it more. He constantly spoke of this to the men. (The italics are not in the original.)
"His fire has gone out, but he left a glow in the hearts of these men which will never go out."
And now it is time that a few questions be asked, simple and direct. It is due him.
Why is it that when he set himself to create he had to contend against that dead-weight of indifference if not the active hostility of organized society recorded in these pages; but when he was commandeered to destroy, that society clothed him, fed him, sheltered him, trained him, transported him, paid him, nursed him, and buried him?
It is well that we should know what has been squandered. He that might have ennobled generations of men with his great visions and his splendid dreams is mingling his clay with the soil of Belgium. He had the seeds of genius. Capitalism made him a machine gunner.
Is this the best we can find for our artists to do? Is it any wonder that the creative minds of to-day are finding themselves driven to social revolution as their art-form?
In the brown-owl hut beside the Merrimac that summer day in 1917 he remarked in a tone of indulgent irony:
"The 'military experts' have found a nice, polite term for men killed or too badly maimed to fight any more."
"What is it?" I asked.
"'Wastage.'"
—Beethoven: Finale of The Ninth Symphony.
X
VISITATION
Here, at the end, let those measures of the Ninth Symphony sound: no dirge; but a pæan of joy. For in that choral ecstasy of Beethoven's hymn to human brotherhood speaks the whole meaning and purpose of the life that was.
Why have I detained you for a tale so plain? What was he but an obscure young painter, thirty years old, with his way to make? Why should I point him out to you among the millions? Because he was my friend? No. Because he is yours. Because I thought I saw in him the seeds of greatness? No. Because the seeds of greatness which were in him are in you; and he shall make you see them.
I give him to you young men to be your friend, loyal and high-minded. I give him to you young women to be your lover, clean of body and of soul. He will be worthy of your friendship and of your love, and you shall be worthy of his in return.
I give him to you in all the beauty of his youth and he shall never grow old, but he shall himself become one of the heroic friends, one of the great companions. I give you his soul to carry in your own, a life within a life. Through his eyes you may see the wonder and glory of the beautiful world which he saw so joyously. Let his generous heart beat through yours his passion for an ideal society and a better time than ours.
He is to be immortal. And it is you who must make him so. Let him kindle in your hearts a fire which will not go out. He that would have made great canvases glow with the might of his spirit and the splendor of his imagination shall not now live by art alone, but by the living deeds of you. You shall be his masterpieces. You, immortal youth, shall be his immortality.
Away from the dust and heat of the day, when the loud world crowds and clamors, he shall make for you, all in a dim, cool chamber of your souls, a sanctuary—a little space of sacred friendship—where you may enter and, closing the door, renew your vows.
You may have him to stand beside you in hours of triumph, and in hours of disaster; steadier of your aim, sustainer of your courage.
Sit in the twilight with folded hands and he shall speak to you. When moonbeams pour their silent music into your chamber at dead of night and your sight rejoices in them, it is he. Hearken to the beat of surf along a lonely shore; to the song of the hermit thrush in dense thickets; to the whisper of the night wind among the leaves: "It is he!" Kindle to the charm and mystery of a face in the crowd, and "It is he!" Thrill at the return of many-blossomed spring, at the strength of men, at the grace of women, and your joy shall be his joy. In every visitation to you of the truth that not by hate, not by blows, but only by the love of the human heart can the world be won from its evil, he shall live, he shall live again. And the color and rhythm of life, the joy of begetting which he never knew, the joy of creating which he knew so abundantly, when it is yours shall be his also. And so all that is highest and best in you, all that inspired him and that he inspired, shall be the works of art by which he is remembered.
Immortal youth, let him be comrade and friend to you as he was to me; let him live forever in your young hearts, himself forever young, bathed in the glory of eternal dawn.