Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 04 / Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters

Life in this world is a collecting, and all the men and women in it are collectors.

The question is, What will you collect? Most men are intent on collecting dollars. Their waking-hours are taken up with inventing plans, methods, schemes, whereby they may secure dollars from other men. To gather as many dollars as possible, and to give out as few, is the desideratum. But when you collect one thing you always incidentally collect others. The fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish, and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way through the mesh and let your dollars slip into the yeasty deep.

My heart goes out to the collector. In the soul of the collector of old books, swords, pistols, brocades, prints, clocks and bookplates, there is only truth. If he gives you his friendship, it is because you love the things that he loves; he has no selfish wish to use your good name to further his own petty plans—he only asks that you shall behold, and beholding, your eye shall glow, and your heart warm within you.

Inasmuch as we live in the age of the specialist, one man often collects books on only one subject, Dante for instance; another, nothing but volumes printed at Venice; another, works concerning the stage; and still another devotes all his spare time to securing tobacco-pipes. And I am well aware that the man who for a quarter of a century industriously collects snuffboxes has a supreme contempt for the man who collects both snuffboxes and clocks. And in this does the specialist reveal that his normal propensity to collect has degenerated. That is to say, it has refined itself into an abnormality, and from the innocent desire to collect, has shifted off into a selfish wish to outrival.

Prosperous, practical, busy people sometimes wonder why other folks build cabinets with glass fronts and strong locks and therein store postage-stamps, bits of old silks, autographs and books that are very precious only when their leaves are uncut; and so I will here endeavor to explain. At the same time I despair of making my words intelligible to any but those who are collectors, or mayhap to those others who are in the varioloid stage.

And so then if I tell you a thing you already know, I confer on you the great blessing of introducing you to yourself and of giving you the consciousness that you know.

And to know you know is power. And to feel the sense of power is to feel a sense of oneness with the Source of Power.

Let's see—what was it, then, that we were talking about? Oh, yes! collectors and collecting.

Men collect things because these things stir imagination and link them with the people who once possessed and used these things. Thus, through imagination, is the dead past made again to live and throb and pulse with life. Man is not the lonely creature that those folks with bad digestions sometimes try to have us believe.

We are brothers not only to all who live, but to all who have gone before.

And so we collect the trifles that once were valuables for other men, and by the possession of these trifles are we bounden to them. These things stimulate imagination, stir the sympathies, and help us forget the cramping bounds of time and space that so often hedge us close around.

But through fancy's flight we can pick our companions out of the company of saints and sinners who have long turned to dust. I have the bookplates of Holbein and Hogarth, and I have a book once owned by Rembrandt, and so I do not say Holbein and Hogarth and Rembrandt were—I say they are.

And thus the collector confuses the glorious dead and the living in one fairy company; and although he may detect varying degrees of excellence, for none does he hold contempt, of none is he jealous, none does he envy. From them he asks nothing, upon him they make no demands. In the collector's cast of mind there is something very childlike and ingenuous.

Ernest Meissonier, the artist, began collecting very early. He has told us that he remembers, when five years of age, of going with his mother to market and collecting rabbits' ears and feet, which he would take home, and carefully nail up on the wall of the garret. And it may not be amiss to explain here that the rabbit's foot as an object of superstitious veneration has no real place outside of the United States of America, and this only south of Mason and Dixon's line.

But this sweet playtime was not for long—the mother died in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five, aged twenty-four years.

I suppose there is no greater calamity that can befall a child than to lose his mother. Still, Nature is very kind, and for Ernest Meissonier there always remained firm, clear-cut memories of a slight, fair-haired woman, with large, open, gray eyes, who held him in her arms, sang to him, and rocked him to sleep each night as the darkness gathered. He lived over and over again those few sunshiny excursions up the river; and he knew all the reeds and flowers and birds she liked best, and the places where they had landed from the boat and lunched together were forever to him sacred spots.

The destruction of the collection didn't kill the propensity to collect, however, any more than you can change a man's opinions by burning his library. It only dampened the desire for a time. It broke out again after a few years and continued for considerably more than half a century. There was a house at Poissy "full to the roof-tiles" of books, marbles, bronzes and innumerable curios, gathered from every corner of the earth; and a palace at Paris filled in like manner, for which Ernest Meissonier had expended more than a million francs.

In the palace at Paris, when the owner was near his threescore years and ten, he took from a locker a morocco case, and opening it, showed his friend, Dumas, a long curl of yellow hair; and then he brought out a curious old white-silk dress, and said to the silent Dumas, "This curl was cut from my mother's head after her death, and this dress was her wedding-gown."

"I would have every man rich," said Emerson, "that he might know the worthlessness of riches."

Every man should have a college education, in order to show him how little the thing is really worth. The intellectual kings of the earth have seldom been college-bred. Napoleon ever regretted the lack of instruction in his early years; and in the minds of such men as Abraham Lincoln and Ernest Meissonier there usually lingers the suspicion that they have dropped something out of their lives.

"I'm not a college man—ask Seward," said Lincoln, when some one questioned him as to the population of Alaska. The remark was merry jest, of course, but as in all jest there lurks a grain of truth, so did there here.

At the height of Meissonier's success, when a canvas from his hand commanded a larger price than the work of any other living artist, he exclaimed, "Oh, if only I had been given the advantages of a college training!"

If he had, it is quite probable that he never would have painted better than his teacher. Discipline might have reduced his daring genius to neutral salts, and taken all that fine audacity from his brush.

Meissonier while but a child set to work making pictures—he declared he would be an artist. And in spite of his father's attempts to shame him out of his whim, and to starve him into a more practical career, his resolution stuck.

He worked in a drugstore and drew on the wrapping-paper; then with this artist a few days, and then with that. He tried illustrating, and finally a bold stand was made and a little community formed that decided on storming the Salon.

There is something pathetic in that brotherhood of six young men, binding themselves together, swearing they would stand together and aid each other in producing great art.

The dead seriousness of the scheme has a peculiar sophomore quality. There were Steinheil, Trimolet, Daumier, Daubigny, Deschaumaes and Meissonier, all aged about twenty, strong, sturdy, sincere and innocently ignorant—all bound they would be artists.

Two of these young men were sign-painters, the others did odd jobs illustrating, and filled in the time at anything which chance offered. When one got an invitation out to dinner he would go, and furtively drop biscuit and slices of meat into his lap, and then slyly transfer them to his waistcoat-pockets, so as to take them to his less fortunate brethren.

They sketched eternally, formed small wax models, and made great preparations for masterpieces.

The reason they did not produce the masterpieces was because they did not have money to buy brushes, paints and canvas. Neither did they have funds to purchase food to last until the thing was done; and it is difficult to produce great art on half-rations. So they formed the brotherhood, and one midnight swore eternal fealty. They were to draw lots: the lucky member was to paint and the other five were to support him for a month. He was to be supplied his painting outfit and to be absolutely free from all responsibility as to the bread-and-butter question for a whole month.

Trimolet was the first lucky man.

He set diligently to work, and dined each evening on a smoking mutton-chop with a bottle of wine, at a respectable restaurant. The five stood outside and watched him through the window—they dined when and where they could.

His picture grew apace, and in three weeks was completed. It was entitled, "Sisters of Charity Giving Out Soup to the Poor." The work was of a good machine-made quality, not good enough to praise nor bad enough to condemn: it was like Tomlinson of Berkeley Square.

This so inflated Trimolet that he suggested it would be a good plan to keep right on with the arrangement, but the five objected.

Steinheil was next appointed to feed the vestal fire. His picture was so-so, but would not sell.

Daubigny came next, and lived so high that inspiration got clogged, fatty degeneration of the cerebrum set in, and after a week he ceased to paint—doing nothing but dream.

When the turn of the fourth man came, Meissonier had concluded that the race must be won by one and one, and his belief in individualism was further strengthened by an order for a group of family portraits, with a goodly retainer in advance.

Straightway he married Steinheil's sister, with whom he had been some weeks in love, and the others feeling aggrieved that an extra mouth to feed, with danger of more, had been added to the "Commune," declared the compact void.

Trimolet still thought well of the arrangement, though, and agreed, if Meissonier would support him, to secure fame and fortune for them both.

Meissonier declined the offer with thanks, and struck boldly out on his own account.

She couldn't—nothing but death could have stayed such ambition. His will was unbending and his ambition never tired.

He was an athlete in strength, and was fully conscious that to be a good animal is the first requisite. He swam, rowed, walked, and could tire out any of his colleagues at swordplay or skittles.

But material things were scarce those first few years of married life, and once when the table had bread, but no meat nor butter, he took the entire proceeds of a picture and purchased a suit of clothing of the time of Louis the Grand: not to wear, of course—simply to put in the "collection."

Small wonder is it that, for some months after, when he would walk out alone the fond wife would caution him thus: "Now Ernest, do not go through that old-clothes market—you know your weakness."

"I have no money, so you need not worry," he would gaily reply.

Of those times of pinching want he has written, "As to happiness—is it possible to be wretched at twenty, when one has health, a passion for art, free passes for the Louvre, an eye to see, a heart to feel, and sunshine gratis?"

He belonged to no school, but simply worked away after his own fashion; what he was bound to do was to produce a faithful picture—sure, clear, strong, vivid. He saw things clearly and his sympathies were acute, as is shown in every canvas he produced.

Meissonier had the true artistic conscience—he was incapable of putting out an average, unobjectionable picture—it must have positive excellence. "There is a difference," said he, "between a successful effort and a work of love." He painted only in the loving mood.

No greater blessing than the artistic conscience can come to any worker in art, be he sculptor, writer, singer or painter. Hold fast to it, and it shall be your compass in time when the sun is darkened. To please the public is little, but to satisfy your Other Self, that self that leans over your shoulder and watches your every thought and deed, is much. No artistic success worth having is possible unless you satisfy that Other Self.

But like the moral conscience it can be dallied with until the grieved spirit turns away, and the wretch is left to his fate.

Meissonier never hesitated to erase a whole picture when it did not satisfy his inward sense—customers might praise and connoisseurs offer to buy, it made no difference. "I have some one who is more difficult to please than you," he would say; "I must satisfy myself."

The early domestic affairs of Meissonier can best be guessed from his oft-repeated assertion that the artist should never marry. "To produce great work, Art must be your mistress," he said. "You must be married to your work. A wife demands unswerving loyalty as her right, and a portion of her husband's time she considers her own. This is proper with every profession but that of Art. The artist must not be restrained, nor should even a wife come between him and his Art. The artist must not be judged by the same standards that are made for other men. Why? Simply because when you begin to tether him you cramp his imagination and paralyze his hand. The priest and artist must not marry, for it is too much to expect any woman to follow them in their flight, and they have no moral right to tie themselves to a woman and then ask her to stay behind."

From this and many similar passages in the "Conversations" it is clear that Meissonier had no conception of the fact that a woman may possibly keep step with her mate. He simply never considered such a thing.

A man's opinions concerning womankind are based upon the knowledge of the women he knows best.

Meissonier associated with good women, but he never knew one with a spread of spiritual wing sufficient to fit her to be his companion. There is a minor key of loneliness and heart hunger running through his whole career. Possibly, in the wisdom of Providence, this was just what he needed to urge him on to higher and nobler ends. He never knew peace, and the rest for which he sighed slipped him at the very last. "I'm tired, so tired," he sighed again and again in those later years, when he had reached the highest pinnacle.

And still he worked—it was his only rest! Meissonier painted very few pictures of women, and in some miraculous way skipped that stage in esthetic evolution wherein most artists affect the nude. In his whole career he never produced a single "Diana," nor a "Susanna at the Bath." He had no artistic sympathy with "Leda and the Swan," and once when Delaroche chided him for painting no pictures of women, he was so ungallant as to say, "My dear fellow, men are much more beautiful than women!"

During the last decade of his life Meissonier painted but one portrait of a woman, and to America belongs the honor. The sitter was Mrs. J. W. Mackay, of California.

As all the world knows, Mrs. Mackay refused to accept the canvas. She declared the picture was no likeness, and further, she would not have it for a gift.

"So you do not care for the picture?" asked the great artist.

"Very well, Madam. I think—I think I'll keep it for myself. I'll place it on exhibition!" And the great artist looked out of the window in an absent-minded way, and hummed a tune.

This put another phase on the matter. Mrs. Mackay winced, and paid the price, which rumor says was somewhere between ten and twenty-five thousand dollars. She took the little canvas in her carriage and drove away with it, and what became of the only portrait of a woman painted by Meissonier during his later years, nobody knew but Mrs. Mackay, and Mrs. Mackay never told.

Meissonier once explained to a friend that his offense consisted in producing a faithful likeness of the customer.

The Mackay incident did not end when the lady paid the coin and accepted the goods. Meissonier, by the haughtiness of his manner, his artistic independence, and most of all, by his unpardonable success, had been sowing dragons' teeth for half a century. And now armed enemies sprang up, and sided with the woman from California. They made it an international episode: less excuses have involved nations in war in days agone. But the enemies of Meissonier did not belong alone to America, although here every arm was braced and every tongue wagged to vindicate the cause of our countrywoman.

The argument sounded plausible. And so the battle raged, just as it has since in reference to Zola.

The tide of Meissonier's prosperity began to ebb: prospective buyers kept away; those who had given commissions canceled them.

Meissonier's friends saw that something must be done. They inaugurated a "Meissonier Vindication," by making an exhibition of one hundred fifty-five "Meissoniers"—and the public was invited to come and be the jury. Art-lovers from England went in bodies, and all Paris filed through the gallery, as well as a goodly portion of provincial France. By the side of each canvas stood a gendarme to protect it from a possible fanatic whose artistic hate could not be restrained.

To a great degree this exhibition brought feeling to a normal condition. Meissonier was still a great artist, yet he was human and his effects were now believed to be gotten by natural methods. But there was a lull in the mad rush to secure his wares. The Vanderbilts grew lukewarm; titled connoisseurs from England were not so anxious; and Mrs. Mackay sat back and smiled through her tears.

Meissonier's success had been too great. As a collector he had overdone the thing. Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs. Charles Lamb's covetous looking on the book when it was red, daily for months, meanwhile hoarding his pay, and at last one Saturday night swooping down and carrying the volume home to Bridget in triumph, is the true type.

But money had come to Meissonier by hundreds of thousands of francs, and often sums were forced upon him as advance payments. He lived royally and never imagined that his hand and brain could lose their cunning, or the public be fickle.

The fact that a "vindication" had been necessary was galling: the great man grew irritable and his mood showed itself in his work: his colors grew hard and metallic, and there were angles in his lines where there should have been joyous curves.

Debts began to press. He painted less and busied his mind with reminiscence—the solace of old age.

The canvas known as "Eighteen Hundred Seven," which is regarded as Meissonier's masterpiece, has a permanent home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The central figure is Napoleon, at whose shrine the great artist loved to linger. The "Eighteen Hundred Seven" occupied the artist's time and talent for fifteen years, and was purchased by A. T. Stewart for sixty thousand dollars. After Mr. Stewart's death his art treasures were sold at auction, and this canvas was bought by Judge Henry Hilton and presented to the city of New York.

There are in all about seventy-five pictures by Meissonier owned in America. Several of his pieces are in the Vanderbilt collection, others are owned by collectors in Chicago, Cleveland and Saint Louis.

There are various glib sayings to the effect that the work of great men is not appreciated until after they are dead. This may be so and it may not. It depends upon the man and the age. Meissonier enjoyed full half a century of the highest and most complete success that was ever bestowed upon an artist.

William Michael Rossetti has summed the matter up well by saying: "Perfection is so rare in this world that when we find it we must pause and pay it the tribute of our silent admiration. It is very easy to say that Meissonier should have put in this and omitted that. Had he painted differently he would have been some one else. The work is faultless, and such genius as he showed must ever command the homage of those who know by experience the supreme difficulty of having the hand materialize the conceptions of the mind. And yet Meissonier's conceptions outmatched his brush: he was greater than his work. He was a great artist, and better still, a great man—proud, frank, fearless and conscientious."

The march of progress and the rage for improvement make small impression on Venice. The cabmen have not protested against horsecars as they did in Rome, tearing up the tracks, mobbing the drivers, and threatening the passengers; neither has the cable superseded horses as a motor power, and the trolley then rendered the cable obsolete.

In short, there never was a horse in Venice, save those bronze ones over the entrance to Saint Mark's, and the one Napoleon rode to the top of the Campanile. But there are lions in Venice—stone lions—you see them at every turn. "Did you ever see a live horse?" asked a ten-year-old boy of me, in Saint Mark's Square.

"Yes," said I; "several times."

"Are they fierce?" he asked after a thoughtful pause. And then I explained that a thousand times as many men are killed by horses every year as by lions.

But although your gondolier may not be able to read or write, he yet has his preferences in music and art, and possesses definite ideas as to the eternal fitness of things. In Italy, many of the best paintings being in churches, and all the galleries being free on certain days, the common people absorb a goodly modicum of art education without being aware of it. I have heard market-women compare the merits of Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, and stupid indeed is the boat "hooker" in Venice who would not know a "Titian" on sight.

The history of Venice is nothing to a gondolier. "Why, Signore! how should I know? Venice always has been," explained Enrico, when I asked him how old the city was.

When I hired Enrico I thought he was a youth. He wore such a dandy suit of pure white, and his hatband so exactly matched his sash, that I felt certain I was close upon some tender romance, for surely it was some dark-eyed lacemaker who had embroidered this impossible hatband and evolved the improbable sash!

The exercise of rowing a gondola is of the sort that gives a splendid muscular development. Men who pull oars have round shoulders, but the gondolier does not pull an oar, he pushes it, and as a result has a flat back and brawny chest. Enrico had these, and as he had no nerves to speak of, the passing years had taken small toll. Enrico was sixty. Once he ran alongside another gondola and introduced me to the gondolier, who was his son. They were both of one age. Then one day I went with Enrico to his home—two whitewashed rooms away up under the roof of an old palace on the Rialto—and there met his wife.

There was no furniture in the rooms worth mentioning—Italians do not burden themselves with things—but on the wall I caught sight of a bright-colored unfinished sketch of the Bridge of Sighs. It was little more than an outline, and probably did not represent ten minutes' work, but the lines seemed so firm and sure that I at once asked who did it.

"An American did it, Signore, an American painter; he comes here every year; our son is his gondolier and shows him all the best places to paint, and takes him there when the light is good and keeps the people back so the artist can work—you understand? A shower came up just as his Excellency, the American, began on this, and it got wet and so he gave it to my son and he gave it to me."

"What is the painter's name?" I asked. Enrico could not remember, but Mona Lisa said his name was Signore Hopsmithiziano, or something like that.

"And who painted that?" I asked.

Enrico crossed himself in silence, and Mona Lisa's subdued voice answered: "Our other son did that. He was only nineteen. He was a mosaicist and was studying to be a painter; he was drowned at the Lido."

The old woman made the sign of the cross, her lips moved, and a single big tear stood on her leathery cheek. I changed the painful subject, and soon found excuse to slip away. That evening as the darkness gathered and twinkling lights began to appear like fireflies, up and down the Grand Canal, I sat in a little balcony of my hotel watching the scene. A serenading party, backing their boats out into the stream, had formed a small blockade, and in the group of gondolas that awaited the unraveling of the tangle I spied Enrico. He had a single passenger, a lady in the inevitable black mantilla, holding in her hands the inevitable fan. A second glance at the lady—and sure enough! it was Mona Lisa. I ran downstairs, stepped out across the moored line of gondolas, took up a hook, and reaching over gently pulled Enrico's gondola over so I could step aboard.

"Where have you been?" I asked—"you fine old lovers!"

And then they explained that it was a Holy Day and they had been over to the Church of San Giorgio, and were now on their way to Santa Maria de' Frari.

"It is a very special mass, by torchlight, and is for the repose of the soul of Titian, who is buried there. You may never have an opportunity to see such a sight again—come with us," and Enrico held out his strong brown hand.

Titian was born one hundred years before Rubens, and died just six months before Rubens' birth.

On the one hundred twenty-second anniversary of the birth of Titian, Rubens knelt at his grave, there in the church of Santa Maria de' Frari, and vowed he would follow in the footsteps of the illustrious master. And the next day he wrote to his mother describing the incident. Thousands of other sentimental and impulsive youth have stood before that little slab of black marble on which is carved the simple legend, "Tiziano Vecellio," and vowed as Rubens did, but out of the throng not one rendered such honor to the master as did the brilliant Fleming. The example of Titian was a lifelong inspiration to Rubens; and to all his pupils he held up Titian as the painter par excellence. In the Rubens studio Titian was the standard by which all art was gauged.

When Rubens returned to Flanders from Italy he carried with him twenty-one pictures done by the hand of the master.

Titian was born at the little village of Cadore, a few miles north of Venice. When ten years of age his father took him down to the city and apprenticed him to a worker in mosaic, the intent of the fond parent probably being to get the youngster out of the way, more than anything else.

An inscription on a tomb at Beni Hassan, dating from the reign of Osortasen the First, who lived three thousand years before Christ, represents Theban glassblowers at work. I told Enrico of this one day when we were on our way to a glass-factory.

"That's nothing," said Enrico; "it was the glassblowers of Venice who taught them how," and not a ghost of a smile came across his fine, burnt-umber face.

There is a story by Pliny about certain Phenician mariners landing on the shores of a small river in Palestine and making a fire to cook their food, and afterward discovering that the soda and sand under their pots had fused into glass. No one now seriously considers that the first discovery of glass, and for all I know Enrico may be right in his flat statement that the first glass was made at Venice, "for Venice always was."

Young Tiziano from Cadore did not like the mere following of a set pattern—he introduced variations of his own, and got his nose tweaked for trying to improve on a good thing. Altogether he seemed to have had a hard time of it there at Messer Zuccato's mosaic-shop.

The painters thought themselves great folks, and used to make the others wait on them and run errands, serving them as "fags."

But the Vecellio boy did not worship at the shrine of the painters who made the designs. He said he could make as good pictures himself, and still continued to make changes in the designs when he thought they should be made; and once in a dispute between the boy and the maker of a design, the master took sides with the boy. This inflated the lad with his own importance so, that shortly after he applied for the position of the quarrelsome designer.

The fine audacity of the youngster so pleased the master that he allowed him to try his hand with the painters a few hours each day. He was getting no wages anyway, only his board, and the kind of board did not cost much, so it did not make much difference.

The brightest scholar in the studio of Gian Bellini was a young man by the name of Giorgio, but they called him Giorgione, which being interpreted means George the Great. He was about the age of Titian, and the two became firm friends.

Giorgione was nearly twenty when we first hear of him. He was a handsome fellow—tall, slender, with an olive complexion and dreamy brown eyes. There was a becoming flavor of melancholy in his manner, and more than one gracious dame sought to lure him back to earth, away from his sadness, out of the dream-world in which he lived.

Giorgione was a musician and a poet. He sang his own pieces, playing the accompaniment on a harp. Vasari says he sang his songs, playing his own accompaniment on a flute, but I think this is a mistake.

Giorgione never wrought so well as Burne-Jones, because he lived in a different age—all art is an evolution. Painting is a form of expression, just as language is a form of expression. Every man who writes English is debtor to Shakespeare. Every man who paints and expresses something of that which his soul feels is debtor to Giorgione and Botticelli. But to judge of the greatness of an artist—mind this—you must compare him with his contemporaries, not with those who were before or those who came after. The old masters are valuable, not necessarily for beauty, but because they reveal the evolution of art.

Between Burne-Jones and Giorgione came Botticelli. Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli. Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust. Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli's "Spring," I need not state which figure: a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes about the face of one of the women.

There are various pictures in the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Pinacothek at Munich, signed with Giorgione's name, but Mrs. Jameson declares they are not his, "because they do not speak to your soul with that mild, beseeching look of pity," Possibly we should make allowance for Mrs. Jameson's warm praise—other women talked like that when Giorgione was alive.

Giorgione was one of those bright luminaries that dart across our plane of vision and then go out quickly in hopeless night, leaving only the memory of a blinding light. He died at thirty-three, which Disraeli declares is the age at which the world's saviors have usually died—and he names the Redeemer first in a list of twenty who passed out at the age of three-and-thirty. Disraeli does not say that all those in his list were saviors, for the second name he records is that of Alexander the Great, the list ending with Shelley.

Giorgione died of a broken heart.

The girl he loved eloped with his friend, Morta del Feltri, to whom he had proudly introduced her a short time before. It is an old story—it has been played again and again to its Da Rimini finish. The friend introduces the friend, and the lauded virtues of this friend inflames imagination, until love strikes a spark; then soon instead of three we find one—one groping blindly, alone, dazed, stunned, bereft.

Surely, disembodied spirits have no control over mortals, or the soul of Giorgione would have come back and smitten the hand of Titian with palsy.

For a full year before he died Giorgione had not spoken to Titian, although he had seen him daily.

Giorgione had surpassed all artists in Venice. He had a careless, easy, limpid style. But there was decision and surety in his swinging lines, and best of all, a depth of tenderness and pity in his faces that gave to the whole a rich, full and melting harmony.

Titian admired Giorgione; he admired him so much that he painted exactly like him—or as nearly as he could.

Titian was a good-looking young man, but he was not handsome like Giorgione. Yet Titian did his best; he patronized Giorgione's tailor, imitated his dreamy, far-away look, used a brush with his left hand, and painted with his thumb. His coloring was the same, and when he got a commission to fresco the ceiling of a church he did it as nearly like Giorgione frescoes as he could.

This kind of thing is not necessarily servile imitation—it is only admiration tipped to t' other side. It is found everywhere in aspiring youth and in every budding artist.

As in the animal kingdom, genius has its prototype. In the National Gallery at London you will see in the Turner Room a "Claude Lorraine" and a "Turner" hung side by side, as provided for in Turner's will. You would swear, were the pictures not labeled, that one hand did them both. When thirty, Turner admired Claude to a slavish degree; but we know there came a time when he bravely set sail on a chartless sea, and left the great Claude Lorraine far astern.

He avoided his society. He ceased to speak to him when they met, and forbade his friends to mention the name "Titian" in his presence.

It was about this time that Giorgione's ladylove won fame by discarding him in that foolish, fishwife fashion. He called his attendants and instructed them thus: "Do not allow that painter from Cadore—never mind his name—to attend my funeral—you understand?"

Then he turned his face to the wall and died.

In his studio were various pictures partly completed, for it seems to have been his habit to get rest by turning from one piece of work to another. His executors looked at these unfinished canvases in despair. There was only one man in all Venice who could complete them, and that was Titian.

Titian was sent for.

He came, completed the pictures, signed them with the dead man's name, and gave them to the world.

"And," says the veracious Vasari, "they were done just as well, if not better than Giorgione himself could have done them, had he been alive!"

It was absurd of Giorgione to die of a broken heart and let Titian come in, making free with everything in his studio, and complete his work. It was very absurd.

Morta deserted the girl, fled from Venice, joined the army, and a javelin plunged through his liver at the battle of Zara ended his career.

The quality of sentiment that clings about the life of Giorgione seems to forbid a cool, critical view of his work. Byron indited a fine poem to him; and poetic criticism seems for him the proper kind. The glamour of sentiment conceals the real man from our sight. And anyway, it is hardly good manners to approach a saint closely and examine his halo to see whether it be genuine or not. Halos are much more beautiful when seen through the soft, mellow light of distance.

Giorgione's work was mostly in fresco, so but little of it has survived. But of his canvases several surely have that tender, beseeching touch of spirit which stamps the work as great art.

Whether Mrs. Jameson is right in her assumption that all canvases bearing Giorgione's name are spurious which lack that look of pity, is a question. I think that Mrs. Jameson is more kind than critical, although my hope is that Renan is correct in his gratuitous statement, "At the Last Great Day men will be judged by women, and the Almighty will merely vise the verdict." If this be true, all who, like Giorgione, have died for the love of woman will come off lightly.

Ruskin has printed more rubbish than literature—ten times over. I have his complete works, and am sorry to say that, instead of confining myself to "Sesame and Lilies," I have foolishly read all the dreary stuff, including statistics, letters to Hobbs and Nobbs, with hot arguments as to who fished the murex up, and long, scathing tirades against the old legal shark who did him out of a hundred pounds. Surely, to be swindled by a lawyer is not so unusual a thing that it is worth recording!

But Ruskin wrote about it, had it put in print, read the proof, and printed the stuff, so no one, no matter how charitably disposed, can arise and zealously declare that this only is genuine, and that spurious. It's all genuine—rubbish, bosh and all.

Titian painted some dreary, commonplace pictures, and he also painted others that must ever be reckoned as among the examples of sublime art that have made the world stronger in its day and generation and proud of what has been.

Titian was essentially a pagan. When he painted Christian subjects he introduced a goodly flavor of the old Greek love of life. Indeed, there is a strong doubt whether the real essence of Christianity was ever known at Venice, except in rare individual cases.

The sensuous glamour of the Orient steeped the walls of San Marco in their rainbow tints, and gave that careless, happy habit to all the Venetian folk. In Titian's time, as today, gay gallants knelt in the churches, and dark, dreamy eyes peeked out from behind mantillas, and the fan spoke a language which all lovers knew. Outside was the strong smell of the sea, and never could a sash be flung open to the azure but there would come floating in on the breeze the gentle tinkle of a guitar.

But Titian, too, as well as Giorgione, infused into his work at times the very breath of life.

At the Belle d' Arte at Venice is that grand picture, "The Assumption," which for more than two hundred years was in the Church of Santa Maria de' Frari. When Napoleon appointed a commission to select the paintings in Venice that were considered best worth preserving and protecting, and take them to the Belle d' Arte, this picture was included in the list. It was then removed from its place, where it had so long hung, above the grave of the man who executed it.

Surely there is an upward law of gravitation as well as a gravitation that pulls things down. Titian has shown us this. And as he drew over and over again in his pictures the forms and faces of the men and women he knew, so I imagine that this woman was a woman he knew and loved. She is not a far-off, tenuous creature, born of dreams: she is a woman who has lived, suffered, felt, mayhap erred, and now turns to a Power, not herself, eternal in the heavens. Into this picture the artist infused his own exalted spirit, for the mood we behold manifest in others is usually but the reflection of our own spirit.

In some far-off eon, ere this earth-journey began, some woman looked at me that way once, just as Titian has this woman look, with the same melting eyes and half-parted lips, and it made an impression on my soul that subsequent incarnations have not effaced.

I bought the photograph in Venice, at Ongania's, and paid three dollars for it. Then I framed it in simple, unplaned, unstained cedar, and it hangs over my desk now as I write.