Lucien Price

“ Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a study of a woman's head in profile. One looked; and then looked again. "Who was she?" She had come to the school as a model for one week: that was all they knew. But her secret was on this canvas. She must have been in her early thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of a place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life has done its worst."
By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four guessed a secret like that? From that moment it was clear to me that he was a portrait painter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fingers mobile, infinitely expressive: they thumb the brush; turn its handle in a ruminating pause; reflect a sudden resolution in the stiffening of tendons....
"And above all this quiet animation and silent dexterity is the regnant, gallant head with dark eyes flashing mastery; the mouth set with purpose; the thick mass of shining black hair breaking into a wave as it falls away from the clear forehead—and all in complete self-forgetfulness, the oblivion of the artist rapt in the joy of creating." ”

“ They are dark.
On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz; student works. One was a small landscape sketch—smouldering red of a sunset after rain, burning through ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in violet mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain of thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its sincerity. There was none of that striving after effect, that ambitious rhetoric which youngsters usually mistake for eloquence: no attempt to make the scene anything more than what it was. The other was a portrait study of a workman naked to the waist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With his eyes wide open to the fact that the very society which promulgates this decree openly winks at its evasion, Fritz abode by it. A slightly sterner set to his jaw; a slightly darker flash in his eye; a slightly grimmer stoicism in the grip on his emotions were all that betrayed the battle which had raged in him between the two creative forces: sex and intellect. He never pretended that the battle was won for keeps. ”

“ He had had his glimpse of the collision between sex and ambition; between the impulse of the woman to create children of flesh and blood, with the man as adjunct and provider; and the impulse of the man to create children of the spirit independently of the woman. He was quick to realize that he had struck something which he had to settle, and he was settling it. The thing was deliciously transparent. Here was a young gentleman tremendously in earnest about being an artist. Being an artist he loved beauty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other fair, both about the same height and build. People would turn to look after them as they passed with an expression of "Wonder who they are. Somebody out of the ordinary."
Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration of Fritz behind a smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would suffer with an amused grin and the massive calm of a mastiff, for he had no such arsenal of repartee as this young gentleman from the household of a Harvard professor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as to set Alexander spinning. ”

“ I amused myself by painting a portrait of Fritz painting. Some day I meant to show it to him.... But here it is:
"He may not be able to talk with his tongue. But give him his brushes and his whole body talks. No gymnastics: but his whole being aquiver. Silent, but his arms, fingers, head, shoulders make animated dumb show. He is conversing delightedly with himself over his work. He has forgotten time and place. Intense mental concentration, and nervous energy. He squints, grimaces, stoops and looks at his canvas wrong-side up. ”

“ Fritz and Christophe took an amazing shine to each other from the start. It was Christophe who led Fritz to read everything else of Romain Rolland he could find, and thus his steps were guided to the summit of that Mount of Vision, Rolland's Life of Tolstoy, whence he looked far and wide into the stern grandeur of that moral wilderness unsubdued by man through which the heroic thinker and prophet pushes on alone.... To look is to follow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With this we are in the heart of the conflict between the artist and the trader: between the will to create and the will to possess. It is the central conflict of any age; especially of this, and especially in America. The young man comes to the forks of the road where he must decide whether he shall acquire or create; whether he shall be a business man or a prophet. He finds himself in a society which offers princely rewards to the commercial career and little but pains and penalties to those who would create. This youngster was just learning his way around in the problem. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A commercial society decrees that the artist cannot have a livelihood until his work is accepted at a commercial value. Pending that acceptance, if he assumes the responsibility of wife and children he also assumes the risk of shackling himself to pot-boiling work for life.
Society also decrees a standard of prenuptial chastity for the male. Suppose the male happens to be more interested in art than in domesticity. He must then ask himself whether he shall abide by a decree which bourgeois society promulgates with more emphasis than sincerity. ”

“ 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 was no time before he sensed the absurdity of attempting to measure creative work by commercial values, and that is, of course, the avenue by which the artist-thinker divines the idiotic husbandry of organizing society to batten those who distribute and those who own by penalizing those who produce and those who create. ”

“ Fritz always noticed people's hands. He found almost as much character in them as in faces. He admired the hands in Rodin's work, especially that of the sculptor in his Pygmalion:—"the tenderness of that hand!" he said. Fred's large hands interested him. The right one he caught hot off the bat. The left caused him no end of trouble. Finally one day he threw down his brush and exclaimed:
"I've watched that left hand come down to rest on that leg a dozen times. I've tried everything else and now I'm going to paint it exactly as it is. After all, it is a hand." ”

“ 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? ”

“ For the astonishing thing was to find a young man of this type studying to be a portrait painter instead of a bond salesman. It didn't sound Yankee. I said so. That shot rang the bell. He began to open up.
He was, it appeared, of German extraction. His grandfather, who had wished to become an artist, had come to America in a period when artists were about as much in request among us as concert pianists on a cattle ranch. He had earned his living as an architectural sculptor. The talent plunged, like a river, underground for a generation ”

“ Fred Middleton, then twenty-seven years old, six years out of Harvard College, thoroughly conversant with the ethics of modern business, was preparing to de-class himself and earn an honest living by manual labor on the land—a farmer, and not a "gentleman farmer." With mock solemnity Fritz was commissioned to do a portrait of Fred. The transaction was conducted on a basis of "free agreement" which would have satisfied even Peter Kropotkin. The painter was to do it any way he chose—absolute free speech. ”

“ Later we used to recite them together in concert like school children in the geography class.
If you took the roof off any Chamber of Commerce you would find half a dozen retired business men whose guilty secret it is that they dabble on the quiet with paint tubes, or modeling clay, or scenarios, or a violin—the poor, damned souls of artists. They have made their "pile." House and lot, wife and children, motor car and country club—all these they have; and yet, gnawing at their hearts is the secret knowledge that they have missed the big thing. They were born to beget children of the spirit ”

“ He recited, with comical irony, the squalid platitudes which are chewed out at a youth bold enough to follow his creative bent:
"'Is there any money in it?' 'Oh, of course, if you get to be a great painter. But how do you know you've got it in you to be a great painter? Think you have? Got a pretty good opinion of yourself, haven't you?' 'What if you fail? Suppose you wake up some morning and find yourself a middle-aged man and a fizzle? ”

“ Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by a triangle of tall brick houses,—the rears of houses on Charles and Brimmer Streets, the fronts of three quaint Italianate red-brick dwellings,—all enclosing a tiny greensward on which slender poplars rustled their glossy leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise the walls and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and on mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-like voices of the choir boys over the melodious thunder of great organ floated up to these windows. ”

“ Give me a man's job!' 'Don't you think it's a little rash, my boy, to risk so much, when if you'd settle down to a good business you'd be sure of a decent living? And what about marriage? If you marry you'll have to paint pot boilers, and then what becomes of your art? You might as well be a business man and be done with it. ”

“ But to eyes grown impatient with the college athlete's all too customary intellectual torpor and social complacency it was a holiday to find this well-made body, tall, broad in the shoulder, narrow at hips, lean and muscular, housing also the brain of the thinker and the spirit of the pioneer. ”

“ He had chosen to live in Pittsburgh, partly because it was his home and partly because it promised him more elbow room.
"I want to paint," said he, "and I do not want to have to play social politics in order to get commissions, as I am afraid I would have to do in Boston. Besides, in Pittsburgh, there are fewer painters to influence me. I stand more chance of being myself."
Alexander James said it was brutal of Fritz to go away to Pittsburgh. The rest of the colony agreed. But it became Fritz's delight to swoop down on us in Boston unannounced. ”