Arthur Jerome Eddy

“ One can imagine Whistler and Carlyle—painter and philosopher, two masters, each in his vocation—in the studio, and the growing portrait, a thing of beauty there, a bond of union between two men so divergent, and one can imagine how beautiful the portrait would be anywhere if by itself amidst harmonious surroundings, whether used as the chief ornament of a dignified hall or placed in a more neutral atmosphere for study and appreciation. ”

“ It is like a world arising from chaos. Its essence is the law of order working itself out. The picture is an agglomeration of agitated members, an agglomeration of planes pulsating with blood, enlivened by breath.
The planes may be stratified, parallel and similar to each other; they may rear and pile themselves against each other, or they may interlock like cogs. They may liquefy and melt away, or they may double up and form themselves into balls. They may, more quietly, rest within themselves, becoming effective through the contrast of their essence and yet maintaining themselves. ”

“ Nature needs no telephone; from time immemorial it has used wireless telegraphy in a condition of perfection unknown to man. Every morning Mount Blanc sends a message to Pike's Peak, and it sends it on over the waters to Fujisan. The bosom of the earth thrills with nervous energy; the air is charged with electric force; the blue ether of the universe throbs with motion. Nature knows no environment; but man is fettered, a spirit in a cage, a mournful soul that seeks companionship in misery. Solitude is a word unknown to nature's vocabulary. ”

“ I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd,—‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’—expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face with the most perfect comfort and entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people malign some of Turner’s noble passages of light to pass to some really ungrammatical and false pictures of the old masters in which we have color given without light. ”

“ Young visionaries—to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists—whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. ”

“ Color is a means of representation not only of what is colored, but also of the thick and the thin; of the solid and the liquid; of the light and of the heavy; of the hard and of the soft; of the corporeal and of the spacious. Cézanne models with color; with tinted color surfaces he builds a landscape. The proper couching of colored planes can force upon us the impression of depth; colored transitions call forth the impression of ascent and of motion; spots scattered here and there give the impression of sprightly vivaciousness.
Color is a means of expression talking directly to the soul. ”

“ As children and men we enjoy the color-effects of fireworks against the blackness of night, and we enjoy the darkness and the shadows about us, the sudden light upon expectant faces, the dark-moving figures in the intervals. All this is delight in color,—color without sentiment, color without story, color without other thought or reflection than pure sensuous enjoyment; and we even feel the tawdry cheapness of the attempt when by set arrangement the features of some local or national celebrity are presented. ”

“ Unhappy the man who does not believe his country the best on earth and his people the chosen of men.
The promise of automobiling is knowledge of one's own land. The confines of a city are stifling to the sport; the machine snorts with impatience on dusty pavements filled with traffic, and seeks the freedom of country roads. Within a short time every hill and valley within a radius of a hundred miles is a familiar spot; the very houses become known, and farmers shout friendly greetings as the machine flies by, or lend helping hands when it is in distress. ”

“ A cry is the language of the child; speech is the every-day utterance of the man; the heart of the singer bursts forth in song; the musician speaks in harmonies, the painter in line and color, the sculptor in form, the architect in structure, the poet in rhyme and rhythm—and each is silent save in his own way.... ”

“ A man need not go beyond his doorstep to find a new world; his own country, however small, is a universe that can never be fully explored. And yet such is the perversity of human nature that we know all countries better than our own; we travel everywhere except at home. The denizens of the earth in their wanderings cross each other en route like letters; all Europe longs to see Niagara, all America to see Mont Blanc, and yet whoever sees the one sees the other, for the grandeur of both is the same. ”

“ There is no denying that, and it takes even the most impartial and sympathetic observer a long time to pick out the things which are fine in color and line and to readjust his notions of beauty.
Many of the pictures are brutal and most of them are crude, but while the first impression may be one of ugliness it is more, it is one of exceeding vitality.
There is nothing musty about the moderns, their canvases are so alive they scream.
As compared with the subdued tones of an academic exhibition a modern seems like a babel of discordant sounds, but the confusion is more apparent than real. ”

“ Who could have predicted the triumphs of Napoleon from a study of his Corsican forbears, or the strange genius of Lincoln from his illiterate progenitors and humble surroundings, or the elemental force of Walt Whitman from his ancestry and American conditions?
No one; and yet there is the profound conviction that each of these men, like every great man,—prophet, king, statesman warrior, poet, or painter,—appeared, not miraculously, but as the inevitable result of irresistible forces; that the brilliant man is, after all, the son of his parents and the child of his times. ”

“ At Newport every one labors under the disadvantage of being known,—for the most part too well known. How painful it must be to spend summer after summer in a world of reality, where the truth is so much more thrilling than any possible fiction that people are deprived of the pleasure of invention and the imagination falls into desuetude. At Narragansett every one is veneered for the occasion,—every seam, scar, and furrow is hidden by paint, powder, and rouge; the duchess may be a cook, but the count who is a butler gains nothing by exposing her. ”

“ If he paint a storm he must at the moment realize passing over him the very tornado which tears up trees from their roots and houses from their foundations. Should he depict the seacoast with its cliffs and moving waters, at the moment of putting the wave-bound rocks into the picture he must feel that they are being placed there to resist the fiercest movement of the ocean, while to the waves in turn he must give an irresistible power to carry all before them. ”

“ The playwright cannot address the audience save through the play, the poet speaks only through his poetry, the painter through his pictures, the sculptor through the forms of his creation. Seldom is an artist gifted with more than one tongue, and that tongue is his art. How, then, can artists interpret the work of artists? How can the painter, who is dumb save with his brush, or the sculptor, who is mute save with his clay and chisel, tell the world anything about the work of others? ”

“ In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their trunks ring hollow with decay.
And if we never really see or know or understand the nature which is about us, how is it possible that we should ever comprehend the people we meet? ”

“ Every really great painter must have moments when, as he thinks of the days and years spent painting things—just things for people to look at and see—he asks himself, “Is it worth while to spend all one’s life painting things one sees? Is it not possible to paint the things one feels?”
Sargent is tired of portrait painting—why? Because he longs to do something else. But what he is doing is simply another form of portrait painting—and not so big. He has simply turned from men and women to chairs and tables—so to speak; that is, from portraits of people to pictures of things—all the same art. ”

“ It is a great portrait, one of his very best, a haunting likeness of a woman; not such a photographic likeness as friends and relatives demand, but just the likeness that posterity demands: a woman, a type, with all the charm, all the refinement, all the real, the true, the elusive qualities of a woman,—in short, those qualities of mind and body which reappear in descendants of the third and fourth generation and demonstrate the faithfulness of the portrait.
There is no portrait by Rembrandt or Velasquez which at all resembles Whistler’s portrait of his mother. ”

“ It does not matter whether a vast volume of water is pouring over the sharp edge of a cliff, or a huge pile of scarred and serrated rock rises to the heavens, the grandeur is the same; it is not the outward form we stand breathless before, but the forces of nature which produce every visible and invisible effect. The child of nature worships the god within the mountains and the spirit behind the waters; whereas we in our great haste observe only the outward form, see only the falling waters and the towering peaks. ”

“ A composer may be inspired by a walk in the country, says M. Picabia, and produce a production of the landscape scene, of its details of form and color? No; he expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of the impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form. Modern music has won its way; this modern painting, too, will find appreciation and understanding in the days to come.
The Cubists have set themselves a hard task. It is a good deal easier to sing an emotion than paint one. ”

“ The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue sky or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local color; this local color, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light or quenched in the gray of the shadow ”

“ Everybody serves wine, no one understands it; everybody drinks it, no one loves it. From a fragrant essence wine has become a coarse reality,—a convention. Chablis with the oysters, sherry with the soup, sauterne with the fish, claret with the roast, Burgundy with the game,—champagne somewhere, anywhere, everywhere; port, grand, old ruddy port—that has disappeared; no one understands it and no one knows when to serve it; while Madeira, that bloom of the vinous century plant, that rare exotic which ripens with passing generations, is all too subtle for our untutored discrimination. ”

“ The artist who concedes nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing, accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every hand.
It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own pleasure that we shall exalt the universe.
To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one must fall back on music. ”

“ That a great nation should deliberately discourage the importation of beautiful things, should wallow in the mire of ugliness and refuse to be cleansed by art, was to him a mystery,—for what difference does it make whether painting, poetry, and music come out of the East or out of the West, so long as they add to the happiness of a people? And why should painting and sculpture find the gate closed when poetry and music are admitted? ”

“ The beach is perfect,—hard, firm sand, sloping so gradually into deep water, and with so little undertow and so few dangers, that children can play in the water without attendants. The village itself is inoffensive, the country about is attractive; but the crowd—the crowd that comes in summer—comes with a rush almost to the hour in July, and takes flight with a greater rush almost to the minute in August,—the crowd overwhelms, submerges, ignores the natural charms of the place, and for the time being nature hides its honest head before the onrush of sham and illusion. ”

“ The attitude of the “portrait-painter” may be likened unto that of the “poet laureate,” whose verse is at the command of conditions he does not{245} control; who may, by accident, write a good thing,—but the rule is otherwise, with even the best.
To rightly place a human being on canvas, or in stone, or in marble, or in poetry, is the noblest achievement of art. On the technical side it exhausts the resources of the art; on the spiritual side it exhausts the genius of the artist. But “portrait-painting” as a profession, as an industrial and a commercial proposition, is a degradation of art. ”

“ I will paint you men and women, not as you see them on the street and in the drawing room—superficial resemblances—but as they really are to you and to me, human beings the true significance of which is not expressed in the drooping of a moustache, the lifting of an eyebrow. I will paint them in black or brown or red or blue, or in gold or bronze, as does the sculptor ”

“ The hour of sunrise is the hour for work, it is the hour when every living thing feels the impulse to do something. The birds do not fly to the tree-tops to view the morning sun, the animals do not rush forth from their lairs to watch the landscape lighten with the morning's glow; no, all nature is refreshed and eager to be doing, not seeing; acting, not thinking. Man is no exception to this all-embracing rule; his innate being protests against idleness; the most secret cells of his organization are charged to overflowing with energy and demand relief in work. ”

“ The interest expressed in much impressionist painting is only an interest of curiosity. The painter represents facts that he has only just noticed. He is like a clever journalist who makes an article out of his first observations of a new country. But the aim of the Post-Impressionist is to substitute the deeper and more lasting emotional interest for the interest of curiosity.
Like the great Chinese artists, they have tried to know thoroughly what they paint before they begin to paint it, and out of the fulness of their knowledge to choose only what has an emotional interest for them. ”

“ A picture is painted in a certain environment of light, color, and tone,—and to Whistler this environment was a vital consideration. For the time being the canvas is the one conspicuous thing in the studio, of even greater importance than subject or model. From this environment of creation, and with which it is in perfect harmony, it is violently forced into conjunction with great squares of atrocious gilt frames and expanses of clashing canvases.
A gallery of pictures is the slaughter-house of art; annual exhibitions are the shambles of beauty. ”

“ From these reflections it is only too plain that the automobile —like that other inartistic instrument of torture, the grand piano —is not adapted to the drawing-room. It is not quite at home in the stable; it demands a house of its own. If the friend who invites you to visit him has a machine, then accept, for he is a brother crank; but if he has none, do not fill his generous soul with dismay by running up his drive-way, sprinkling its spotless white with oil, leaving an ineradicable stain under the porte-cochere, and frightening his favorite horses into fits as you run into the stable. ”

“ For the first time in the history of painting painters are systematically claiming the same independence, the same right to express themselves freely in each canvas, to paint in the one picture if they see fit glimpses of different countries, cities, scenes, different times as well as places; to use them and suggest them as freely as the poet does to express a mood—and why not? ”

“ And should not the brush-worker at home be given his meed of protection against the pauper brush-workers of Europe—even against Rembrandt and Velasquez and all the glorious Italians?
Beethoven and Mendelssohn and Mozart, Shakespeare and Milton,—their works, even their original manuscripts, if in existence, though costly beyond many paintings, come in without let or hinderance; but the work of the painter, the original manuscript of the poet in line, of the composer of harmonies in color, may not cross the border without tribute.
A symphony in sound is welcomed; a symphony in color is rejected. ”

“ Morning is not the hour for contemplation; but when evening comes, as the sun sinks towards the west, and lengthening shadows make it seem as if all nature were stretching herself in repose, then do we love to rest and contemplate the rich loveliness of the earth and the infinite tenderness of the heavens. Every harsh line, every glare of light, every crude tone has disappeared. We stroke nature and she purrs. We sink at our ease in a bed of moss and nature nestles at our side ”

“ Details are lost in vast shadows; huge buildings loom up vaguely towards the heavens, impressive masses of masonry; the bridges, outlined by rows of electric lights, are strings of pearls about the throat of the dusky river. The red, white, and green lights of invisible boats below are so many colored glow-worms crawling about, while the countless lights of the vast city itself are as if a constellation from above had settled for the time being on the earth beneath. ”