USA > California > History of California, Volume V > Part 30
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The wives and daughters of the "patrons of art" went to Paris, too-for fashions in clothes and husbands- while the "patrons" stayed at home in the wooden palaces-they who had "sown the wind," while the community "reaped the whirlwind."
Virginia City, raised in a night and gutted in a decade, remains as the most expressive ghost of that inebriated period. It stands in its barren hills, a pitiable, falling, ever so fitting monument to its creators: and its "Internation Hotel" (where the banquets brought straight from San Francisco by train, with the cham- pagne on the ice, were served) is the epitome of what vulgarity can do to architecture and the sister arts: the chapter properly closes there, where it began.
There was to be no resumption of the old good and sedate taste in building; things had come to too utter a smash in matters of taste. Whatever art there was, had something of the look of surreptitiousness worn by our old house holder, going about his decencies with "The Jolly Giant" in his coat-tail pocket.
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Change was inevitable, even had California escaped the gross flatulency of the bonanza years. The railroad had spanned the continent and she was no longer a rich province apart from the world, but a sharer now in its wide unrest. San Francisco had earlier attained to public collections of art: at Woodward's Garden and at the "Cob-web Palace" on Meigg's wharf (that unholy bar-room, with its monkeys chattering over the sawdust floor). If in those early days, one's childish innocence was taken everywhere, the first impression of ranged works of art in gold frames, is permeated with the odor of animals, stuffed and alive: or as at the "Mechanic's Fair," with the scent of peanuts and popcorn. "Art" wore the aspect of being enormously popular, even though it was so largely foreign and imported.
"Duncan's Auction Rooms" had been succeeded by the established art stores. A little community of artists gathered and nested in the "Latin Quarter," and there must have been some latent discernment among patrons to support so meritorious a group as that formed by Hill, Keith, Tavenier, Yelland, and the others who managed to fruitfully survive.
Looking now upon the paintings done at that time, there was every justification for survival. It was good painting and in particular instances of an expertness quite amazing. The painters were for the most part, men who had been well trained before their advent in California; and if their response to the new wonder of nature was expressed in the established language of their schooling, it was a language that adequately conveyed their bright surprise at the large prospect.
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The work of Thomas Hill has been neglected of late, since it has become the fashion to diminish the creations of the school to which he belonged; that "school" man- aged its panoramic canvases with wonderful skill; and Hill with his sure brush and rapid execution had an eye open to the light and met and solved certain prob- lems, at a time when the problems had scarcely become apparent to the majority of the painters in America.
Of William Keith, self-trained as he was in California, there is not space here to justly speak. As he remains the best known and most widely honored painter that California has produced, the critical estimate of his work is inevitably to be made in the future. How great that work was at its best: how it stands with the best landscape art that followed Constable and the French- men of 1830, requires no temerity in assertion. The task will always be to protect our judgment, by holding to the highest in his enormous and very unequal production. The critic of the future is less likely to be 'swamped' in his estimate, than is a contemporary. Keith's art at its very personal best is of a rich imag- ining on the themes afforded by nature; but both Keith and Hill and the painters of their time and later, looked upon the actual nature about them with (shall we say) something of the eyes of strangers in a strange land. Their transcripts are undoubtedly of the Cali- fornia scene, but we feel (as we feel in the great majority of works of landscape art) that set down anywhere on the earth, the painters would employ this identical language of transcription. Here and there a great man
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does speak in the particular terms of the country about him, fits the language to his native theme; Vermeer, Constable, Corot, Titian, Valasquez, and the Chinese masters thus speak. It would seem to mean that the artist and his theme had become mutually penetra- tive, and it is this interchange and perfect transfusion that we must wait for in California's art.
The students returning from Paris began at this time to bring their gifts to the local altar; the late eighties and early nineties brought us the echo of the little Renaissance in New York through a group of young architects, painters, and decorators. It was a charming brief period filled with enthusiasm and a quite fresh perception of the city and its romantic beauty and the beauties of California. The social life had again at- tained something of the old orderliness and serenity, only now its activities in art were preëminently in the hands of youth. Writers, painters, sculptors, archi- tects, and musicians communicated their enthusiasms one to the other, in a communion closer and more stimulating than has ever happened locally, before or since.
Things were accomplished in the community's sense of the meaning of art, if little that was actual and sub- stantial took visible form. The artists were playing the part of discoverers and prophets in the California environment and then, having prophetized-most of them went to New York. The material opportunities here were not frequent enough that was all: California could not feed all her fledglings and they were crowded out of the nest, to sing or paint or carve their way to
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success or fame somewhere else. None of them failed and many have brought honor to the name of California. The sons and daughters of the state continue to seek and to pervade the older centers and to manifest their gifts in all the arts, in almost embarrassing numbers.
Architecturally, this decade witnessed the first attempt at a revival of Spanish colonial that was too excitedly undertaken to be successful in its adaptation to modern and changed uses and it is only now and occasionally, that the lessons of that old style are beginning to be sympathetically applied and the warnings afforded by the first adventures, regarded.
This decade of the nineties accomplished beyond its public buildings, a type of middle class dwelling that is distinguished by refinement and the use of the native woods. These dwellings inaugurated what may be regarded as almost a "Californian" style in homes. The redwood interiors of the dwellings made agreeable backgrounds for the domestication of the Japanese works of art that were being collected and the refine- ments of that art continue to exert a strong influence upon California life and its struggle toward a conscious sense of beauty.
This oriental thread appears as a leading influence in the art instruction in the public schools. That sys- tem is a notable one, the seed of which was planted and first blossomed in the old "Broadway School" in San Francisco, there proving the case for art as an educa- tional means, as probably it was never so charmingly proved before.
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The handicrafts and secondary arts began to flourish at this time in a legitimate association with architecture. Illustration, freed from its dependence upon the en- graver, took the initial steps toward its present journal- istic loquacity. Photography (which had put an end to wood and steel engraving) made her claim to a place among the arts. The gardens, that had heretofore "happened" were now brought to design and a wide field opened that promises to yield a local expression in a noble art. Sculpture found its true place as public monuments were erected under demand of a new civic pride.
There had been decorators at work in San Francisco during the middle period, who had capably frescoed the theatres and palaces and bar-rooms: but it was in the nineties that the first mural paintings in the modern sense, were executed by artists eager for the larger problems and the larger surfaces which the wall offers.
And in all of these various and faltering efforts there was a quality of ingenuousness that our later perform- ances appear to have missed, and that might well make us pause.
Mere habit and increasing expertness seem somehow to rob the work of art of the bloom, the charm, of humbleness and self-forgetfulness. One suspects that it is this expertness of hand, this easy habit in produc- tion, that is the real menace to art in every age: and that most seriously is it the menace in the formative period of a people's expression, when old and essential truths are waiting to be retold in a new language-a language to be cautiously evolved by the processes of time and deep thinking.
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If in the nineties we were a little hesitant and humble, yet out of that decade emerge two names that will make a distinctive claim upon the consideration of the future: Arthur Atkins the painter; Arthur Putnam the sculptor. Both men saw natively and with their own eyes and each inevitably spoke his own language. In their language we have perhaps, an intimation of what ultimately, the speech of California is to be.
Yet both men embody in their works the great traditions of the art of the past: and so they place securely in our hands again, the inspiring filament which connects us with all that is sanest in humanity's struggle to express beauty and the truth of beauty. With the assurance this thread affords us in the present confused state of the arts, we had perhaps, best reverently hold it as a clue (indubitably our own) and merely stand and wait the confirmation of the future.
What that future is to offer, we cannot guess. So far as we have gone, our worth appears to lie, not so much in what we have done, as in what we are and promise to become. The exodus of California artists continues. It is the strange sign of deeper things in the young commonwealth. It is the announcement of a rich fertility hidden and mysterious, in those spiritual qualities and impulses which, in a race, bring to birth the poet, the painter, the builder and the musician.
In our ignorance of what these spiritual impulses are and from whence they are derived, we must strive to learn how to nourish, how to cherish them: and how not, by any coarsening of our perceptions or receptivities, to thwart and destroy them.
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The sign has been given to us and to the world. What it signifies cannot be claimed as our human accomplishment. It is an inestimably precious gift placed in our care. And the ultimate test of our civilization, will be the use that we have managed to make of it-our integrity as custodians.
Merce
CALIFORNIA BOOKS AND AUTHORS
A REVIEW of California books and authors within the limits of this article must make many omissions. Only the writers of real genius, the books that have made a strong appeal to the public can be included. Only the most salient features of these books, the most striking traits of their authors, can be dwelt upon. It has come to be accepted that something in the atmosphere of Califor- nia has given to its authors a quality that sets them apart from those who have lived their lives under less sunny skies, under more conventional social rules. No one can fully understand California authors who has not come into some intimate touch with pioneer con- ditions in the Far West. The Sierra is an actual physical barrier between California, with its climate and sky of Italy, and the East, with its six months of snow and ice. The California pioneers raised an equally formidable barrier between this new life and the old conventional life east of the plains.
The California pioneer Bret Harte has drawn truly, but it is false to depict the women of pioneer days as he drew them-the outcasts of the dance hall and the gambling den. Some one will yet immortalize the pioneer mother of California-a woman whom no dan- ger daunted and no labor tired; a woman of larger mold, physical and moral, than the average mother of our day, who knew neither fear nor sickness, but looked with clear vision beyond her rude and hard life and gave her children a Spartan training for which they bless her in these Laodicean days of a thin-necked and narrow-chested generation.
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What has set the broad arrow-mark of originality and force on California books and authors? My theory is that the tremendous spiritual and moral rebound that followed the great gold rush of '49 has made itself felt ever since in the thought and feeling of California. Beside this unparalleled gold rush the Klondike epi- sode was like a modern hunting trip into East Africa compared with one of Stanley's expeditions into the then unknown "Dark Continent." Beside the long six months' trip across the plains, beset by savage Indian tribes, the Chilcoot Pass was the pink tea of hardship and adventure.
These California pioneers lived a life free from all restraint save that of honesty and square dealing between men. If a man had a pet vice, that vice came out and reared its ugly head. Many lives were wrecked by the lust of the flesh and the lure of gam- bling, but the men who resisted these temptations, who had the courage to bring out their wives and children to this new land, developed a fine moral fibre that the strait-laced and conventionally-protected never know. They lived their own lives untrammeled by conventions. Those who had the literary faculty, who grew up here or came here in their plastic youth, felt the stimulus of this new, strange life and put it into their books. Some of these were not of heroic mold, for it is given to many writers to stir the hearts of readers when they are cold themselves. But the great majority felt the passion and the poetry of this strange pioneer genera- tion, and they have put something of its splendid heat and its potent thrill into their books.
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This revolt from old rules and conventions is also responsible for the large number of caricaturists and humorists found among California writers. From John Phoenix to Mark Twain, from J. Ross Browne to Wallace Irwin, there is the same delight in shocking the unco' good. The same spirit that moved the California pioneer is seen in another generation in the cowboy of the plains, now almost as extinct as the buffalo and the blanket Indian. The barb-wire fence and the small farmer killed the cowboy, but the aroma of romance lingers about him as the survival of that spirit which animates the literature of California. The man who spends six months shut in by frost and snow, who gathers about the family stove every night for comfort as well as for companionship, is entirely alien to the Californian, who has no fireside and a large part of whose life is spent in the open. To make these two kinds of people see things with the same eyes is as vain as to try to harmonize the nomad of the desert and the inmate of a monastery.
The California climate, like that of ancient Greece, has something in it which develops the artistic tem- perament. All the surroundings suggest the land of Phidias and Homer. When the Californian takes the ride from Patras to Athens, when he passes around the Gulf of Corinth, he is ready to exclaim that across the blue water is the Marin shore as seen from San Fran- cisco. The rugged mountains, the glacier-smoothed hills, the sharp indentations of the coast line, the color of the vine and olive-clad slopes, the turquoise blue of the sea, with mottled shades due to floating seaweed-
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all these are reminders of Carmel and Monterey Bay. The modern Greek is a far cry from the Greek of Marathon and Thermopylae, but he has the mental nimbleness, the artistic temperament, the keen curi- osity about every new thing that marked the Athenian of the days of Plato and Socrates.
The same thing is true of the Californian. He develops early, both mentally and physically. He is lighter of fancy, more fond of pleasure and more artistic than his eastern brother, who spends six months in a long fight with cold and sleet and ice. And what he has contributed to literature is marked by these mental traits. It is bright, artistic, buoyant, optimistic.
Eastern and European people who saw the San Franciscans just after the earthquake and fire, mar- veled at the courage of the women and children, noted the absence of tears and lamentations, wondered at the hopeful spirit which saw already the ruins cleared and the old homes renewed. A large part of this spirit was due to the climate, which had molded and changed the character of these people-more than half of them born in the East, but transformed into genuine Californians by the influence of climate and environment. The Californian is a natural optimist; he always looks on the bright side. Hence he has none of those fierce wrestlings of spirit that disturb the descendant of the Puritan, whose digestion is faulty and whose liver does not work properly. The blessed alchemy of the sun- shine sweetens thought as well as purifies the blood and clears the vision.
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Humor and broad caricature marked the early California writers, of whom the first was Captain George H. Derby, better known as "John Phoenix" and "Squibob." He was an engineer in the regular army, and spent several years in San Diego and other parts of California, before it was a state. He not only made sport of the army, but he wrote many amusing sketches of early California life, which are as good reading today as when they were written. His best book is "Phoe- nixiana," which includes some of his ridiculous recom- mendations to the army department, as well as veracious accounts of his management of a pioneer newspaper of San Diego. Derby did not make use of the outlandish spelling of Artemus Ward, but he was far more artis- tic, and the proof is that his book endures better than that of Artemus.
Mark Twain was the logical successor of John Phoenix and though he came west in his young manhood, he must be counted as a Californian, for it was the pioneer life of Nevada and California that first stimulated his genius. The printer's trade has given the world many great authors, but it is doubtful whether Mark Twain would ever have developed as a writer without the stimulus of the remarkable life of Virginia City into which he was plunged, and the association with many bright writers who were attracted to that mining camp by the large salaries paid to clever newspaper men. And his development was the more rapid because of his lack of early school training. Of all the California writers he became in his maturity the ablest. His genius as a humorist blinds most readers to the fact that as a literary artist he is head and shoulders above most
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of his contemporaries. All of his humorous work shows literary skill in the highest degree, while descriptive passages in "The Innocents Abroad" and chapters in his "Life of Joan of Arc" reach the high water-mark of genuine eloquence.
Mark Twain ripened with the years, and his work at last came to have a greater influence upon Europeans than that of any other American author. The man himself had queer kinks in his brain. His greatest failing was his want of reverence, which led him into such an act of incredibly bad taste as his famous cari- cature of Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes at a New England society dinner in Boston. There is rich humor in this after-dinner speech, but no normal man, with any reverence for these authors, would have had the hardihood to perpetrate such a joke as Mark attempted.
In broad humor, in tenderness for the weak and the oppressed, in pity for the unfortunate and in righteous wrath over hypocrisy and untruth, Mark Twain's work has never been surpassed. "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "Life on the Mississippi," the chapters in "Huckleberry Finn" on the southern blood feuds, and the "Life of Joan of Arc," I regard as his best work. Other chapters and stories should be gathered into a volume for permanent preservation, because his fame is really hurt by the mass of his work. Mark Twain deserves rank among the first of the great American authors, and it is equally certain that California has a valid claim on him as one of her writers, with the unmistakable tang of the soil.
For twenty years Bret Harte has been regarded as the typical California novelist and poet. Though his
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boyhood was spent in the rude mining camps of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and his young manhood in San Francisco, still most of his literary work was done abroad. For many years he made his home in London, and there he died. It seemed as though absence from his old home endowed him with a pecu- liar clairvoyant power to reproduce so perfectly the scenery, the color, the very odor of the California woods and fields, that the reader is able to see them in his mind's eye. It makes no difference whether he is describing a great snow storm in the Sierra in "Gabriel Conroy," or the heart of the primeval redwoods in "In the Carquinez Woods," or the flat marshy country below San Francisco, brooded over by the mysterious fog, in "By Shore and Sedge," Bret Harte always paints a picture that is full of life and color. It is the same with his characters: they live and breathe, but unfortunately, they are no more like real Californians of pioneer times than Dickens' characters are like real flesh and blood English people of his day. In fact, Bret Harte bears the closest resemblance to Dickens in his sentimental view of life and his fondness for caricature of character. But there the resemblance ends, for Harte is far the finer literary artist in the sense of style and the ability to tell a story without digressions.
One who has followed Bret Harte's development closely can divide his productive life into two periods. The first was that splendid creative morning when he wrote the short stories that gave him fame. "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and "Tennessee's Partner" always appealed
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to me as the greatest of his work, because in these he did not indulge in his propensity to caricature. "The Luck" is pure comedy, but gives a graphic picture of pioneer mining life. "The Outcasts" de- picts a typical pioneer gambler and two women of the dance halls. The last tells of the love surpassing the love of woman that grew up between mining partners in early California days. These three stories show Bret Harte at his best, with less of the cynical comment and the cheap melodramatic flourishes that disfigure so much of his work. All three are flawless in their reflection of the strange life of the early California mining camps-wild, unconventional, yet ruled by the simple law of honesty and fair dealing, and presided over by Judge Lynch, whose decisions were never subject to appeal. These early stories Bret Harte never equalled in the years that followed, just as Kipling has never written stories as good as "Without Benefit of Clergy," "At the End of the Passage," "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows," and "Beyond the Pale."
The second period of Bret Harte's artistic life began when in London he indulged in dreams of his early life in far-off California, and saw again in his mind's eye the scenes that were stamped on his boyish imagi- nation. His is a case of arrested development, for he never advanced beyond a certain point and his latest work reveals no comprehension of the enormous changes that had transformed California and had made it a land in which the novelist would have felt himself an alien.
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The poetry of Bret Harte shows no depth, but it reveals flashes of genius and an uncanny divination of character. His "Heathen Chinee" is perhaps best known and is a thing apart-a literary spotlight thrown on John Chinaman. His "San Francisco" still remains the best picture in verse of the gray wind-swept city that saw his first taste of fame, and his "Dickens in Camp" was the finest tribute laid by the world's poets on the bier of the greatest creative writer of the last century. In his poetry, as in his prose, he showed the most consummate artistry, never putting forth any work that was not highly finished. As a man, Bret Harte had some ugly traits, chief among which was a certain callous selfishness, shown in the cruel neglect of the work of other California poets, after promises of aid with publishers. With all his defects, Bret Harte re- mains among the most typical of our California writers.
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