James Lane Allen

“ On the heights the cathedral rises—slowly, as the great houses of man's Christian faith have always risen.
Years have drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have drifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted the snows away. Well nigh a generation of human lives has already measured its brief span about the cornerstones. ”

“ Now out upon the darkened battle-field {14} of this woman's face shines one serene sun, and it is that sun that brings out upon it its marvelous human radiance, its supreme expression: the love of the mother. Your model is the beauty of motherhood, the sacredness of motherhood, the glory of motherhood: that is to be the portrait of her that you are to paint. ”

“ There has come in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old—the look of faith in immortal things. She is not now the mother with the tenderness of this earth but the mother with the expectation of eternity. Her eyes have followed him who has left her arms and gone into a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance. Your portrait, if you can paint it, will be the mother with the look of immortal things in her face. ”

“ But the stranger of the park had kindled within her that night what she herself had long tended unlit—the alabaster flame of worship which the mother burns before the altar of a great son.
An hour later they were in another small attic-like space next to the supper-room. Here was always the best of their evening. No matter how poor the spot, if there reach it some solitary ray of the great light of the world, let it be called your drawing-room. Where civilization sends its beams through a roof, there be your drawing-room. This part of the garret was theirs. ”

“ That night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor; the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread. There is a victory which human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation by the genius of choice and of touch. A battle of that brave and desperate kind had been won in this garret. ”

“ These seek to cast their weaknesses on its strength, to join their brief day to its innumerable years, to fall into the spiritual splendor of it as out in space small darkened wanderers drop into the orbit of a sun. Anguished memories begin to bequeath {140} their jewels to its shrine; dimmed eyes will their tears to its eyes, its windows. Old age with one foot in the grave drags the other resignedly about its crypt. In its choir sound the voices of children herded in from the green hillside of life's April. ”

“ You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new work. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, she has hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light which was in her face and which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The old look is gone. It is gone, and will never come back—the tender, brooding, reverent happiness {132} and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee—that great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past. ”

“ Once he had been a headlong art student himself, starting out to become a great painter, a great one. After years abroad under the foremost masters and other years of self-trial with every favorable circumstance his, nature had one day pointed her unswerved finger at his latest canvas as at the earlier ones and had judged him to the quick: you will never be a great painter. If you cannot be content to remain less, quit, stop! ”

“ Even before the accustomed hour the big barnlike room, with a few prize pictures of former classes scattered about the walls, and with the old academy easels standing about like a caravan of patient camels ever loaded with new burdens but ever traveling the same ancient sands of art—even before nine o'clock the barnlike room presented a scene of eager healthy animal spirits. On the easel of every youthful worker, nearly finished, lay the portrait of the mother. ”

“ A single sign of victory was better even than the money in the pocket—the whole lad himself. He was strongly {31} built, frankly fashioned, with happy grayish eyes, which had in them some of the cold warrior blue of the sky that day; and they were set wide apart in a compact round head, which somehow suggested a bronze sphere on a column of triumph. Altogether he belonged to that hillside of nature, himself a human growth budding out of wintry fortunes into life's April, opening on the rocks hardy and all white. ”

“ All these are sublime things to paint in any human countenance; they are the footprints of destiny on our faces. The greatest masters of the brush that the world has ever known could not have asked for anything greater. When you behold her, perhaps some of you may think of certain brief but eternal words of Pascal: 'Man is a reed that bends but does not break.' Such is your model, then, a woman with a great countenance ”

“ Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building with dormer-windows and a crumpled three-sided roof, the studios of the National Academy of Design; and under that low brittle skylight youth toils over the shapes and colors of the visible vanishing paradise of the earth in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an eternal one. ”

“ She was aware only of the brutality of her position; and her face, by its confused expressions and quick changes of color, showed what painful thoughts surged. Afterward a change came gradually. As though she could endure{23} the ordeal only by forgetting it and could forget it only by looking ahead into the happiness for which it was endured, slowly there began to shine out upon her face its ruling passion—the acceptance of life and the love of the mother glinting as from a cloud-hidden sun across the world's storm. ”

“ In truth a shaft as of celestial light suddenly fell upon her doorway; a far-sent radiance rested on the head of her son; in her ears began to sound old words spoken ages ago to another mother on account of him she had borne. To her it was an annunciation.{81}
Her first act was to place her hand on the head of the lad and bend it back until his eyes looked up into hers; his mother must be the first to congratulate him and to catch from his eyes their flash of delight as he realized all that this might mean: the fulfilment of life's dream for him. ”

“ Do you find portraits of either men or women who radiate the overwhelming passions, the vital moods, of our galled and soaring nature? It is not a long time since the Middle Ages. In the stretch of history centuries shrink to nothing, and the Middle Ages are as the earlier hours of our own historic day. But has there not been a change even within that short time? Did not the medieval portrait-painters portray in their sitters great moods as no painter portrays them now? How many painters of to-day can find great moods in the faces of their sitters?
"And so I come again to your model. ”

“ We teachers of art schools in engaging models have to take from human material as we find it. The best we find is seldom or never what we would prefer. If I, for instance, could have my choice, my students would never be allowed to work from a model who repelled the student or left the student indifferent. No students of mine, if I could have my way, should ever paint from a model that failed to call forth the finest feelings. Otherwise, how can your best emotions have full play in your work; and unless your best emotions enter into your work, what will your work be worth? ”

“ You have in truth copied from her one of the great beacon-lights of expression that has been burning and signaling through ages upon ages of human history—the look of the mother, the angel of self-sacrifice to the earth. ”

“ Slowly the cathedral rises, in what unknown years to stand finished! Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped, of better laws. Finished and {139} standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for order in the land and order throughout the world, for order in the secret places of the soul. Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country which invites all lives into it and wastes lives most ruthlessly—lives which it stands there to shelter and to foster and to save. ”

“ As on some mountain-top a tall pine-tree casts its lengthened shadow upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun, so the cathedral{138} flings hither and thither across the whole land its spiritual shaft of light. A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it, begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form. ”

“ This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes ”

“ Beyond smearings and daubings of paint, as past the edges of concealing clouds, one caught glimpses of a serene and steadfast human radiance. There one beheld the familiar image of that orb which in dark and pathless hours has through all ages been the guardian light of the world—the mother. ”

“ The young grass along the foot of this slope was thick and green; imagination missed from the picture rural sheep, their fleeces wet with April rain. Along the summit of the slope trees of oak and ash and maple and chestnut and poplar lifted against the sky their united forest strength. Between the trees above and the grass below, the embankment spread before the eye the enchantment of a spring landscape, with late {26} bare boughs and early green boughs and other boughs in blossom.
The earliest blossoms on our part of the earth's surface are nearly always white. ”

“ There are quite a number of old gentlemen in New York, and a good many young ones, who would gladly pay that amount for your investments, for your securities."
The lad with eager upturned countenance did not conceal his amusement while the man drew this picture of him as a living ragged gold-mine, as actually put together and made up of pieces of fabulous treasure. A child's notion of wealth is the power to pay for what it has not. The wealth that childhood is, escapes childhood; it does not escape the old. ”

“ And in painting remember that the best is never in the eye, for the eye can only perceive, the eye can only direct; and the best is never in the hand, for the hand can only measure, the hand can only move. ”

“ For a world of living-men and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs for a little space between the two eternities—a road strewn with the dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross of burden but with eyes turned toward the same Cross of hope. ”

“ They are mere beginners; {20} their art is still unformed. But you may believe that they will put their best into what they are about to undertake; the loyalty of the hand, the respect of the eye, the tenderness of their memories, consecration to their art, their dreams and hopes of future success. Now if you will be good enough to sit here, I will pose you."
He stepped toward a circular revolving-platform placed at the focus of the massed easels: it was the model's rack of patience, the mount of humiliation, the scaffold of exposure. ”

“ How few faces does any one of us know that frankly radiate the great passions and moods of human nature! What little is left of this ancient tremendous drama is the poor pantomime of the stage. Search crowds, search {114} the streets. See everywhere masked faces, telling as little as possible to those around them of what they glory in or what they suffer. Search modern portrait galleries. ”

“ This bridge of falling notes is as Nature's bridge of falling drops: individual drops appear for an instant in the rainbow, then disappear, but century after {33} century the great arch stands there on the sky unshaken. So throughout the ages the bridge of sacred music, in which individual voices are heard a little while and then are heard no longer, remains for man as one same structure of rock by which he passes over from the mortal to the immortal. ”

“ She thought of it as being like some great characters in human life which need so little to make them go easily and make them go right. A wise touch, and their enormous influence is sent whither it should be sent by a pressure that would not bruise a leaf. ”

“ So there he was now, the lad, or what there was left of him, this quiet Sunday, in a pleasant room opposite the cathedral. The air was like early summer.{119} The windows were open. He lay on his back, not seeing anything. The skin of his forehead had been torn off; there was a bandage over his eyes. And there were bruises on his body and bruises on his face, which was horribly disfigured. ”

“ Though worn out with the strain and excitements of the day, she was not yet ready for sleep. She must have the luxuries of consciousness; she must tread the roomy spaces of reflection and be soothed in their largeness. ”