There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people 
sat almost all day long playing cards.  The smallest excursion was 
made on horseback.  You would scarcely ever see the main street 
without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with 
their Mexican housings.  It struck me oddly to come across some of 
the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all 
the characters astride on English saddles.  As a matter of fact, an 
English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, 
a thing unknown in all the rest of California.  In a place so 
exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles 
but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and 
down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with 
cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them 
dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square 
yard.  The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly 
un-American.  The first ranged from something like the pure 
Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure 
Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of 
either race in all the country.  As for the second, it was a matter 
of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely 
mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly 
courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum.  In dress 
they ran to colour and bright sashes.  Not even the most 
Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose 
into his hat-band.  Not even the most Americanised would descend to 
wear the vile dress hat of civilisation.  Spanish was the language 
of the streets.  It was difficult to get along without a word or 
two of that language for an occasion.  The only communications in 
which the population joined were with a view to amusement.  A 
weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to 
the numerous fandangoes in private houses.  There was a really fair 
amateur brass band.  Night after night serenaders would be going 
about the street, sometimes in a company and with several 
instruments and voice together, sometimes severally, each guitar 
before a different window.  It was a strange thing to lie awake in 
nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one 
of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount into the 
night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-
pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican 
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not 
entirely human but altogether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost 
all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was 
from the same class, numerically so small, that the principal 
officials were selected.  This Mexican and that Mexican would 
describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which 
remained to him.  You would ask him how that came about, and elicit 
some tangled story back-foremost, from which you gathered that the 
Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans 
greedy like children, but no other certain fact.  Their merits and 
their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former 
landholders.  It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled 
with the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, 
and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee 
craft.  Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a 
reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great 
minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it 
is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it.  I 
know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case 
occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has 
signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.  To have spoken in the 
matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that 
he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word."  
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought 
up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and 
honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but 
not the creation of agreements.  This single unworldly trait will 
account for much of that revolution of which we are speaking.  The 
Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the 
accusation cuts both ways.  In a contest of this sort, the entire 
booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the more 
scupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely 
seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered.  This is, 
of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in 
the course of being solved in the various States of the American 
Union.  I am reminded of an anecdote.  Some years ago, at a great 
sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a 
small way in the old town of Edinburgh.  The agent had the 
curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible 
use he could have for such material.  He was shown, by way of 
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to 
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.  "And what," he asked, 
"do you propose to call this?"  "I'm no very sure," replied the 
grocer, "but I think it's going to turn out port."  In the older 
Eastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races 
in going to turn out English, or thereabout.  But the problem is 
indefinitely varied in other zones.  The elements are differently 
mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial belt and 
in the group of States on the Pacific coast.  Above all, in these 
last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or 
evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own.  
In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day 
after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and 
a Scotchman:  we had for common visitors an American from Illinois, 
a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and 
from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country 
ranches for the night.  No wonder that the Pacific coast is a 
foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race 
contributes something of its own.  Even the despised Chinese have 
taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but 
the debasing use of opium.  And chief among these influences is 
that of the Mexicans.

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.  They still 
preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their 
affairs snug to themselves.  Only four or five years ago Vasquez, 
the bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him 
in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and 
was seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man.  The 
year that I was there, there occurred two reputed murders.  As the 
Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of 
every one behind his back, it is not possible for me to judge how 
much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one 
case every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that 
there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an instant of 
taking the authorities into their counsel.  Now this is, of course, 
characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy 
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a 
word in this inaction.  Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, 
they seemed not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the 
traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, 
wholly Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost 
entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless 
paper.  Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally 
penniless Miguel.  It is a sort of local currency by courtesy.  
Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition.  I have seen 
a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and 
getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper.  The very 
storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more 
surprised than pleased when they are offered.  They fear there must 
be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom 
from them.  I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer 
begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my 
purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case, 
partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition 
which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be 
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit 
for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.  Now this 
villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian 
nature.  I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers 
of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in 
many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it 
in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences.  Jew 
storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from 
this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and 
keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the 
mill.  So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except 
that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans 
bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly 
bound the Mexican.  It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like 
certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the 
race that holds and tills it for the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County.  
The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain 
under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character.  
The land is held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which 
are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief 
danger and disgrace of California; and the holders are mostly of 
American or British birth.  We have here in England no idea of the 
troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these 
large landholders - land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers, 
they are more commonly and plainly called.  Thus the townlands of 
Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.  How they came there 
is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man 
is hated with a great hatred.  His life has been repeatedly in 
danger.  Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and 
examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen 
thirsting for his blood.  A certain house on the Salinas road, they 
say, he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter 
sent him warning long ago.  But a year since he was publicly 
pointed out for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney.  
Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word of 
explanation is required for English readers.  Originally an Irish 
dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost 
dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there for six months 
or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was 
first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San 
Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own ruin 
by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and 
had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of 
the hands of his rebellious followers.  It was while he was at the 
top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-
cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-
thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to 
"hang David Jacks."  Had the town been American, in my private 
opinion, this would have been done years ago.  Land is a subject on 
which there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend 
the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles 
with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-
Wesson convenient to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old 
friend, the truck system, in full operation.  Men live there, year 
in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all 
consumed in supplies.  The longer they remain in this desirable 
service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice 
in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those 
typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the 
success of the demagogue Kearney.

In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the 
praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel.  The 
valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, 
bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills.  
The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, 
loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a 
quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill.  
From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, 
and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers 
on the shore.  But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of 
the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the 
converted savage.  The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes 
and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily 
widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall.  As 
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary 
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim 
to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse 
have been its portion.  There is no sign of American interference, 
save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for 
pistol bullets.  So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected.  
Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the 
neighbouring American proprietor, and with that exception no man 
troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel.  Only one day in the 
year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the PADRE drives over the hill 
from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered 
portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the 
service; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses 
contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among 
a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God 
served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other 
temple under heaven.  An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years 
of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet 
they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce 
the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they 
sang.  The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and 
staccato.  "In saecula saeculoho-horum," they went, with a vigorous 
aspirate to every additional syllable.  I have never seen faces 
more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian 
singers.  It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by 
which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides 
an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was 
united and expressed.  And it made a man's heart sorry for the good 
fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and 
to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still 
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away 
from all authority and influence in that land - to be succeeded by 
greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots.  So ugly a thing 
may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the 
Society of Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution.  All that I 
say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense.  The Monterey of last 
year exists no longer.  A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by 
the railway.  Three sets of diners sit down successively to table.  
Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live 
oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in 
the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and 
fashion.  Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to 
resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, 
quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a 
lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

[1880]



CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS



I


THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart.  It is a place that 
people love even more than they admire.  The vigorous forest air, 
the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of 
tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves - 
these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre.  
The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the 
shapes of things concord in happy harmony.  The artist may be idle 
and not fear the "blues."  He may dally with his life.  Mirth, 
lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very 
essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling 
forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember.  Even on the 
plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the 
ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and 
healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness 
and hysteria.  There is no place where the young are more gladly 
conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their 
age.

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this 
country to the artist.  The field was chosen by men in whose blood 
there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great 
art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose 
modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients.  It was 
chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art, 
of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales 
and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all 
speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love 
of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-
side primrose.  It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.  And 
for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of 
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.  There is in France 
scenery incomparable for romance and harmony.  Provence, and the 
valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of 
masterpieces waiting for the brush.  The beauty is not merely 
beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises 
while it charms.  Here you shall see castellated towns that would 
befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like 
cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers 
of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.  All these, by 
the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the 
modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to 
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot 
cascade in Cernay valley.  Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; 
even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered.  
But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to 
paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell 
among graceful shapes.  Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, 
is classically graceful; and though the student may look for 
different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate 
his hand and eye.

But, before all its other advantages - charm, loveliness, or 
proximity to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already 
colonised.  The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time 
and tact.  The population must be conquered.  The innkeeper has to 
be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he 
must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in 
a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours 
and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers 
who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy 
tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year.  A colour 
merchant has next to be attracted.  A certain vogue must be given 
to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should 
find himself alone.  And no sooner are these first difficulties 
overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the 
bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate.  This is the 
crucial moment for the colony.  If these intruders gain a footing, 
they not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of 
their long purses, they will have undone the education of the 
innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor 
painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet.  "Not here, O 
Apollo!" will become his song.  Thus Trouville and, the other day, 
St. Raphael were lost to the arts.  Curious and not always edifying 
are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; 
like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his 
chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. 
Grundy must allow him licence.  Where his own purse and credit are 
not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously.  
Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek 
expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as 
he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at 
home.  And when that essentially modern creature, the English or 
American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns 
as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself 
defenceless; he submitted or he fled.  His French respectability, 
quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of 
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation.  But the girls were 
painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last 
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair 
invader.  Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the 
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he 
hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist.  
The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its 
crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part, 
when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the 
necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman, 
is excellent.  To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, 
to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least, 
the king's highway of progress.  Here, in England, too many 
painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the 
intelligent bourgeois.  These, when they are not merely 
indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence 
of art.  And this is the lad's ruin.  For art is, first of all and 
last of all, a trade.  The love of words and not a desire to 
publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading 
of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the 
painter.  The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature, 
is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material 
as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second 
stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of 
representation.  In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; 
that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really 
grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business 
of real art - to give life to abstractions and significance and 
charm to facts.  In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his 
fellow-craftsmen.  They alone can take a serious interest in the 
childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years.  They alone 
can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, 
this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting 
of dull and insignificant subjects.  Outsiders will spur him on.  
They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great 
picture?"  If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade 
him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his 
style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning.  The life of the apprentice to any 
art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small 
successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; 
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he 
come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows 
letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.  But the time comes when a 
man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon 
his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation.  
This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone:  above 
all with painters.  They have made so many studies that it has 
become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with 
them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their 
horn-book.  This class of man finds a congenial home in artist 
villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to 
call them "Snoozers."  Continual returns to the city, the society 
of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of 
humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or 
philosophy, are the means of treatment.  It will be time enough to 
think of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch 
it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the 
painters' village.  "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education; 
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being 
forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the 
very air of France that communicates the love of style.  Precision, 
clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in 
the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be 
acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least 
the more appreciated.  The air of Paris is alive with this 
technical inspiration.  And to leave that airy city and awake next 
day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals.  The 
same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys 
and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty 
in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be 
decorative in its emptiness.


II


In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of 
Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.  I know the whole western 
side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well 
enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without 
some special character and charm.  Such quarters, for instance, as 
the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a 
hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the 
silence of the birds.  The two last are really conterminous; and in 
both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand 
political vicissitudes.  But in the one the great oaks prosper 
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the 
air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs.  In 
the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock 
lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper 
slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the 
great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a 
grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos.  
Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of 
the Paris road runs in an avenue:  a road conceived for pageantry 
and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of 
glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, 
and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen 
far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep.  A little upon 
one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a 
little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and 
heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine 
trees.  So artfully are the ingredients mingled.  Nor must it be 
forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a 
hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an 
unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing; 
and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with 
the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance.  
There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the 
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the 
glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant 
darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive.  It is a 
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in.  As fast as 
your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each 
vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that 
hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers 
and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.  The most savage 
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in 
the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if 
with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, 
has countersigned the picture.  After your farthest wandering, you 
are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, 
to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the 
aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush.  It is not a 
wilderness; it is rather a preserve.  And, fitly enough, the centre 
of the maze is not a hermit's cavern.  In the midst, a little 
mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure; 
and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled by historic 
names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless 
humbug who called himself the hermit.  In a great tree, close by 
the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner 
of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the 
romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of 
sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux.  I had the pleasure of 
his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his perfect 
wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a 
great avidity.  In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-
stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he 
was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious, 
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only 
stock-in-trade to beg withal.  The choice of his position would 
seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places 
still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, 
and that lie unvisited.  There, to be sure, are the blue arrows 
waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the 
corner of a rock.  But your security from interruption is complete; 
you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul 
suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have 
committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could 
still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and 
chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed.  A confederate 
landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he 
would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond; 
and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get 
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of 
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and 
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated 
quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the 
immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests.  And 
the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented 
inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the 
companionable silence of the trees.  The demands of the imagination 
vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows; 
others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets 
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of 
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an 
adjacent county.  To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem 
but an extended tea-garden:  a Rosherville on a by-day.  But to the 
plain man it offers solitude:  an excellent thing in itself, and a 
good whet for company.


III


I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; ET EGO IN ARCADIA 
VIXI, it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying 
close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many 
others, a green spot in memory.  The great Millet was just dead, 
the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters 
were in mourning.  The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in 
the history of art:  in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the 
history of the Latin Quarter.  The PETIT CENACLE was dead and 
buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest 
from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly 
lost; and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a 
sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators.  But 
if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still 
farther expurgated; honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I 
have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest 
painter to depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his 
bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English and 
Americans alone.  At the same time, the great influx of Anglo-
Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious.  There had 
been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and the 
Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry.  It 
would be well if nations and races could communicate their 
qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they 
have an eye to nothing but defects.  The Anglo-Saxon is essentially 
dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we 
call "Fair Play."  The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his 
guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired over-seas and 
left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil 
were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a 
shrug expressed his judgment upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts.  Palizzi 
bore rule at Gretz - urbane, superior rule - his memory rich in 
anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; 
sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath 
these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye 
scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way 
on the appearance of a hunchback.  Cernay had Pelouse, the 
admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a 
full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples, 
bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all 
admired.  Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne.  
Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless 
commonwealth.  Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day 
made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it.  The good 
Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before 
that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely 
death.  He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would 
never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance 
still haunts the memory of all who knew him.  Another - whom I will 
not name - has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of 
his decadence.  His days of royal favour had departed even then; 
but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain 
stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, 
the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing 
battle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy, 
still waiting the return of fortune.  But these days also were too 
good to last; and the former favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I 
heard the truth, by night.  There was a time when he was counted a 
great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of 
time brings in his revenges!  To pity Millet is a piece of 
arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it 
is harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may 
pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to 
opulence and momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was 
suffered step by step to sink again to nothing.  No misfortune can 
exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost progress, even bravely 
supported as it was; but to those also who were taken early from 
the easel, a regret is due.  From all the young men of this period, 
one stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of 
fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.  "Il faut faire de la 
peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience 
had continued his education, if he had been granted health to 
return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must 
believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy 
principles.  At any hour of the night, when you returned from 
wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped 
yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden 
with beer or wine.  The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there 
was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a 
computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying 
share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric:  ESTRATS.  
Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your 
bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your 
disposition.  At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your 
coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest.  The doves had 
perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the 
threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest.  
Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the 
interminable field of forest shadow.  There you were free to dream 
and wander.  And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal 
awaited you on Siron's table.  The whole of your accommodation, set 
aside that varying item of the ESTRALS, cost you five francs a day; 
your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were 
out of luck's way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave 
it pending.


IV


Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it 
was a kind of club.  The guests protected themselves, and, in so 
doing, they protected Siron.  Formal manners being laid aside, 
essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival 
had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined 
observances was promptly punished.  A man might be as plain, as 
dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch 
of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were 
as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies.  I have seen people 
driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words 
what they had done, but they deserved their fate.  They had shown 
themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had 
pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they wanted tact to 
appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette.  And once 
they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its 
cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of 
our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose 
exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from 
the scene of his discomfiture.  These sentences of banishment were 
never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I 
believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, 
that they were never needed.  Painters, sculptors, writers, 
singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky, 
and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into 
the spirit of the association.  This singular society is purely 
French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French 
defects.  It cannot be imitated by the English.  The roughness, the 
impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent 
friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a 
commonwealth.  But this random gathering of young French painters, 
with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life 
of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their 
etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their 
edicts against the unwelcome.  To think of it is to wonder the more 
at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.  This 
inbred civility - to use the word in its completest meaning - this 
natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all 
that is required to make a governable nation and a just and 
prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of 
laughter, and of the initiative of youth.  The few elder men who 
joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their 
companions.  We returned from long stations in the fortifying air, 
our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the 
silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we 
fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn 
chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles 
guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into 
the night.  It was a good place and a good life for any naturally-
minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps 
best of all for the student of letters.  He, too, was saturated in 
this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing 
currents of the world, he might forget that there existed other and 
more pressing interests than that of art.  But, in such a place, it 
was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience, 
like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw 
himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were 
really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health 
and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became 
tormented with the desire to work.  He enjoyed a strenuous idleness 
full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among 
companions; and still floating like music through his brain, 
foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have 
conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words 
that were alive with import.  So in youth, like Moses from the 
mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we 
shall never enter.  They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of 
style that repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-
throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before 
the artist can be born.  But they come to us in such a rainbow of 
glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in 
comparison.  We were all artists; almost all in the age of 
illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the 
strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were 
happy!  But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though 
these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others 
succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the 
amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House 
Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.


V


Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river.  It boasts 
a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many 
sterlings.  And the bridge is a piece of public property; 
anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettante from the 
walls of a hundred exhibitions.  I have seen it in the Salon; I 
have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in the last French 
Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white by 
Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the 
MAGAZINE OF ART.  Long-suffering bridge!  And if you visit Gretz 
to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom 
of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly 
painting it again.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than 
Barbizon.  I give it the palm over Cernay.  There is something 
ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn 
tables standing in one corner, as though the stage were set for 
rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking 
their fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers.  It 
is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down the green inn-
garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see 
the dawn begin across the poplared level.  The meals are laid in 
the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves.  The splash of oars and 
bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside 
the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.  There is 
"something to do" at Gretz.  Perhaps, for that very reason, I can 
recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, 
as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.  This 
"something to do" is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; 
you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and 
behold them gone!  But Gretz is a merry place after its kind:  
pretty to see, merry to inhabit.  The course of its pellucid river, 
whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the 
navigator:  islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the red berries 
cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies, and 
mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs.  And of all noble sweeps 
of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to 
Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Gretz is changed.  The old inn, long shored and trussed 
and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and 
the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former 
guests.  They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall 
the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and 
the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.  But the 
material fabric is now dust; soon, with the last of its 
inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn, 
shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish 
from the world of men.  "For remembrance of the old house' sake," 
as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story.  When the 
tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left 
stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over, 
the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.  It was difficult to 
obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best, 
sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals 
were supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ.  
Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.  But they 
stood firm; eat they must, but having no money they would soil no 
napkins.


VI


Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been 
little visited by painters.  They are, indeed, too populous; they 
have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of 
colonisation.  Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I 
never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed 
himself there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his 
friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green 
country and to the music of the falling water.  It was a most airy, 
quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just too rustic to be 
stagey; and from my memories of the place in general, and that 
garden trellis in particular - at morning, visited by birds, or at 
night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party - I am 
inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny.  
Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily 
slumbering in the plain - the cemetery of itself.  The great road 
remains to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage 
bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room 
the paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago.  
In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there.  From time 
to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the 
glimpses of the moon, and after some communication with flesh and 
blood return to his austere hermitage.  But even he, when I last 
revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the 
roll of Chaillyites.  It may revive - but I much doubt it.  Acheres 
and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question, 
being merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or 
the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side, 
Marlotte alone remains to be discussed.  I scarcely know Marlotte, 
and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it.  It 
seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet.  The inn of Mother Antonie is 
unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable 
enough, is commonplace.  Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I 
were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory.