Jean-Léopold Gérôme

“ In the portrait he has given us, we have the master authoritatively proclaiming his37 convictions. This distinguished artist, by the way, was formerly a pupil of Gérôme's. One day when he was complimenting the latter upon his method of teaching, Gérôme replied, in his loud, assertive voice: "When I undertake to do a thing, I do it to the very end. I am a man with a sense of duty." ”

“ With the artist’s personal development has come maturity of craftsmanship. His latest series of “Mother and Child” are marked by fluency of composition both in the lines and masses and in the colour schemes. But with the ripening of his powers has scarcely followed increase of individuality. He has freed himself from the hard, evenly lighted, rather tight character of Gérôme’s manner only to yield himself to the fascination of the old Italian style. It is a little surprising that one whose imagination is so individual should have failed to discover a really personal language of expression. ”

“ Gérôme had travelled extensively in the East, for he loved its vigorous colouring and picturesque customs. Here is a scene glimpsed from the banks of the Nile, and he has transcribed it in this superb picture, vibrant with colour and harmonious in composition.
And when a prominent politician criticised the official curriculum without proposing anything to take its place, it was, according to M.41 Moreau-Vauthier, again Gérôme who replied: "Gentlemen, it is easier to be an incendiary than a fireman!" ”

“ Doctor Prescott might hold the mortgage and exact his pound of flesh, these poor backs might bend to the yoke, but there was no cringing in the hearts of Abel Edwards and his wife. It was easy to see where Jerome got his spirit.
However, spirit needs long experience and great strength to assert itself fully at all times before long-recognized power. Jerome, going up the road to Doctor Prescott's, felt rather a fierce submission and obligatory humility than defiance. He felt as if this great man held not only himself, but his mother and sister, their lives and fortunes, at his disposal. ”

“ Abel Edwards had said, confidentially, many a time to his boy, who had listened sagely and nodded.
Jerome obeyed his mother with the patient obedience of a superior who yields because his opponent is weaker than he, and a struggle beneath his dignity, not because he is actually coerced. Neither he nor his father ever answered back or contradicted; when her shrill voice waxed loudest and her vituperation seemed to fairly hiss in their ears, they sometimes looked at each other and exchanged a solemn wink of understanding and patience. ”

“ Jerome got his hat, stole softly down-stairs, and out of the front door. “I've got to be alone somewhere, where I can think,” he said to himself, and forthwith made for the site of his mill; he could be sure of solitude there at that hour.
When he arrived, he sat down on a pile of logs and gazed unseeingly at the broad current of the brook, silvering out of the shadows to the light of a young moon. The roar of it was loud in his ears, but he did not seem to hear it. There are times when the spirit of the living so intensifies that it comes into a silence and darkness of nature like death. ”

“ Poor little Jerome had never speculated on the laws of heredity; he had only meant to deny that his father had come to any more disgraceful end than the common one of all mankind. He did not dream, as he raced along home with his sister's shoes, of the different construction which they had put upon his words, but he felt angry and injured.
“That Sim' Basset pickin' on me that way,” he thought. A wild sense of the helplessness of his youth came over him. “Wish I was a man,” he muttered—“wish I was a man; I'd show 'em! All them men talkin'—sayin' anything—'cause I'm a boy.” ”

“ Human strength may endure heavy disappointments and calamities with heroism, but it requires superhuman power to hold one's hand to the grindstone of petty duties and details of life in the midst of them. Jerome had faced his rebuff without a whimper, and with a great stand of spirit, but now he could not go home and work in the garden, and tie his fiery revolt to the earth with spade and hoe. ”

“ Jerome during his sojourn at Rome in 382. For the high altar of this church, Domenichino painted his masterpiece of the Communion of St. Jerome already described. The embarkation of Saint Paula, to follow her spiritual teacher St. Jerome to the Holy Land, is the subject of one of Claude’s most beautiful sea pieces, now in the collection of the Duke of Wellington; another picture of this subject, the figures as large as life, is in the Brera, by a clever Cremonese painter, Giuseppe Bottoni.
St. Jerome has detained its long; the other Fathers are, as subjects of Art, much less interesting. ”

“ Across the young springing grass went Jerome—a slender little lad moving with an awkward rustic lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in themselves powers of observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century. ”

“ Jerome returned, and went off to a distant pile of lumber out of sound of Cheeseman's voice.
He felt a proud sensitiveness, almost a shame, over his calamity, which he would have been at a loss to explain. All day long, when men came to view the scene of disaster, he tried to avoid them. He shrank in spirit even from their sympathy. ”

“ From the Carters we turn to a man of a very different type, who made his way to wealth by sterling integrity and honesty of purpose. William Lemon was born at Germoe in 1696, and baptized in Breage Church on the 15th November of the same year. He received his education at the village school, and being a lad of quick intelligence, he became in the first instance a clerk to a Mr. Coster, connected with the local mining industry. ”

“ As Ann and Elmira did most of their work on the shoes during the day, Jerome fell into the habit of doing his part, the closing, in his uncle's shop at night. Every evening he would load himself with the sheaf of bound shoes and hasten down the road. He liked to work in company with a man, rather than with his mother and Elmira ”

“ Don't give and don't take; then you'll make your way in life.”
Ozias Lamb had said once, in Jerome's hearing, that all the medicine that Doctor Prescott ever gave to folks for nothing was good advice, and he didn't know but then he sent the bill in to the Almighty. Jerome, who had taken this in, with a sharp wink of appreciation, in spite of his mother's promptly sending him out of the room, thinking that such talk savored of irreverence, and was not fit for youthful ears, remembered it now, as he heard Doctor Prescott admonishing poor John Upham. ”

“ When Jerome reached home, he was immediately seized by Paulina Maria. “Go right out and wash your face and hands real clean,” said she, “and then go up-stairs and change your clothes. I've laid them out on the bed. When you get to the neckerchief, you come down here, and I'll tie it for you; it's your father's. You've got to wear somethin' black, to be decent.” ”

“ Now and then a gust of cold wind, sweet with unseen blossoms, smote him powerfully, bending his slender body before it like a sapling. A bird flashed past him with a blue dazzle of wings, and Jerome stopped and looked after it. It lit on the fence in front of the house, and shone there in the sunlight like a blue precious stone. The boy gazed at it, leaning on his spade. Jerome always looked hard out of all his little open windows of life, and saw every precious thing outside his daily grind of hard, toilsome childhood which came within his sight. ”

“ Now he looked hard at Jerome, and could not for the life of him tell what particular boy he was, yet recognized him fully in the broader sense of young helplessness and timid need. “Speak up,” said he; “don't be scared. I know all the children, and I don't know one of 'em. Speak up like a man.”
Then Jerome, stung to the resolution to show this great Squire, Eben Merritt, that he was not to be classed among the children, but was a man indeed, and equivalent to those duties of one which had suddenly been thrust upon him, looked his questioner boldly in the face and answered. ”

“ Jerome looked at it all, and it had a new meaning for him. The outer world is always tinctured more or less to the sight by one's mental states; but who can say, when it comes to outlooks from the keenest stresses of spirit, how impalpable the boundary-lines between beholder and object may grow? ”

“ At the sound of his voice Ann turned around. “It's your father!” she cried out, sharply—“it's your father come home. Abel, here's the children.”
Jerome eyed a small japanned box, or trunk, on the floor, a stout stick, and a handkerchief parcel. He noted then clots of melting snow where the old man had trod. Somehow the sight of the snow did more to restore his faculties than anything else. “For Heaven's sake, let us go to work!” he cried to Elmira, “or he'll die. He's exhausted with tramping through the snow. Get some of that brandy in the cupboard, quick, while I start up the fire.” ”

“ You cannot stay with Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and 86father, a friend of the struggling, a just and generous master. ”

“ I shouldn't wonder if John Upham was some to blame about that; there's always two sides to a story.”
Jerome made no reply. He would have been puzzled several times lately, had he considered it of sufficient moment, by his mother's change of attitude towards Doctor Prescott. He went to the china-closet beside the chimney. On the upper shelves was his mother's best china tea-set; on the lower a little array of cloudy bottles; some small bunches of herbs, all nicely labelled, were packed in the wide space at the bottom. ”

“ The old man always took it, and spat it out when the boy's back was turned.
Jerome used to be fond of storing up checker-berries and sassafras root, and doling them out to a strange small creature with wild, askant eyes and vaguely smiling mouth, with white locks blowing as straightly and coarsely as dry swamp grass, who was wont to sit, huddling sharp little elbows and knees together, even in severe weather, on a stone by the path. She had come into the world and the poorhouse by the shunned byway of creation. ”

“ When Jerome and Elmira came down-stairs he led the way at once into the north parlor, where the most of the guests were assembled. There were the village young women in their best attire, decked as to heads and bosoms with sweet drooping flowers, displaying all their humble stores of lace and ribbons and trinkets, jostling one another with slurring hisses of silk and crisp rattle of muslins, speaking affectedly with pursed lips, ending often a sibilant with a fine whistle, or silent, with mouths set in conscious smiles and cheeks hot with blushes. ”

“ There was no self-justification in it.
“I s'pose Doctor Prescott will be mad if he hears of your goin' there, an' I dun'no' but I should be in his place,” she said, as Jerome went out. Then, as he did not answer, she added, calling out shrilly:
“I don't see why John Upham can't call in Lawrence, if he wants a doctor; he's begun to study with his father; he can't have nothin' against him. I guess he knows as much as you do.” ”

“ In sooth, Gerames’ words had not awakened dread in his soul. Instead, he desired greatly to meet that dwarf, and to try whose will should prove strongest. So he answered that it would [216] ill become a knight, and the son of his father, to shun a meeting with anyone, be he man or fairy, and it might be well for him to take the short road, for many adventures might befall him by the longer.
‘Sir,’ said Gerames, ‘be it as you will; whichever way you take I will go with you.’
Then Huon and Gerames rode at the rear of their company, and entered the wood where Oberon, king of the Fairies, abode. ”

“ Jerome sat down; in spite of himself, as he looked at the doctor opposite, the same old indignant, yet none the less vital, sense of subjection in the presence of superiority was over him as in his childhood. He saw again Doctor Seth Prescott as the incarnation of force and power. There was, in truth, something majestic about the man—he was an autocrat in a narrow sphere; but his autocracy was genuine. The czar of a little New England village may be as real in quality as the Czar of all the Russias. ”

“ Then supper, and after it the old monk carried Gerard to his cell, and they had an eager chat, and the friar incidentally revealed the cause of his pantomime in the corridor. "Ye had well-nigh fallen into Brother Jerome's clutches. Yon was his cell."
"Is Father Jerome an ill man, then?"
"An ill man?" and the friar crossed himself; "a saint, an anchorite, the very pillar of this house! He had sent ye barefoot to Loretto. [179] Nay, I forgot, y'are bound for Italy: the spiteful old—saint upon earth, had sent ye to Canterbory or Compostella. But Jerome was born old and with a cowl ”

“ Jerome filled his short little pipe and lighted it. The pipe always gave him a faintly jaunty feeling. If he ever thought of his destiny as a bit obscure it was certainly never at such times as this. And at worst, though his destiny obviously lacked a great many things he more or less desired, he wouldn’t be willing to change it for anybody else’s.
The world moved busily on every side, heeding him not a bit. Every one, as a matter of fact, had more important things to do than notice a chandlery clerk who wasn’t even sure if his girl had a dimple. ”