|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 12
Through the open windows of a hideous brick row, built to hold as many
laborers' families all the year round and as many Bohemian summer
artists as can crowd therein, we caught glimpses of tapestries worth
their weight in gold. One well-known artist has taken possession of the
end of this uncomely row, intended for a supply-shop to the
neighborhood. This shop is his studio, which he has filled with
treasures of Japanese art. As a Cookhamite assured us, "Mr. C---- goes
in for the _Japanesque_;" and he screens the large display-windows
intended for cheese, raisins, and potted meats with smiling mandarins
and narrow-eyed houris under octopus-like trees.
At the rear of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once
familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic _auberges_ of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of _insouciance_ and
_laissez-aller_, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with
color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and
ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a
pouter pigeon preening itself upon a barrel.
Still another of the ugly cottages, cursed by artists but inhabited by
them, was hired at ten pounds a year by two young landscapists. A
charwoman came every morning to quell the mad riots in which the
household gods (or demons) diurnally engaged, but at all other times the
landscapists manoeuvred for themselves. That the domestic manoeuvring of
young landscapists is not always _toute rose_ we saw reason later to
believe. For not once, twice, nor yet so seldom as a dozen times, have
we seen these young manoeuvrers begin to dine at four, when shadows
were growing too long upon field, thicket, and stream, only to finish we
knew not when, so late into darkness was that "finish" projected. We
could see one of the diners passing along the road from the public
house, an eighth of a mile away, at four, with the _pi�ce de r�sistance_
of the meal in an ample dish enveloped in a towel. Ten minutes later the
other rushes by, contrariwise of direction, in pursuit of beer and the
forgotten bread. A little later, and a scudding white dust-cloud in the
road informs us that one of the dining 'scapists flees breathlessly
vinegar- or salt-ward. Still another five minutes, and the other diner
hies him in chase of the white scud, calling vigorously to it that there
is no butter for the rice, no sugar for the fruit.
We saw at once that this Berkshire corner abounds more in dulcet and
sylvan landscape bits than in picturesque motifs for those who paint
_genre_. The peasants have a certain inchoate picturesqueness, as of
beings roughly evolved from the life of this fair material nature, and
sometimes, in silhouette against dun-gray skies and amid rugged fields,
give one vague feeling of Millet's pathos of peasant life and labor. The
yokel himself, however,--and particularly _herself_,--seems determined
to deny all poetic and picturesque relations, by clothing himself--and
herself--in coarse, shop-made rubbish, in battered, _d�mod�_ town-hats
and flounced gowns from Petticoat Lane.
From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide,
with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames
into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either
descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here
smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of
a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles
and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But
it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the
landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair
hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.
_Ye Hutte_ is a misnomer for the extraordinary establishment, studio and
domicile combined, at which we dismounted. It is not a _hut_, and
neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its
inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue
was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast,
barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch
vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was
erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its
interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and
choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak
ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels and the usual chaotic
_impedimenta_ of painters. The choir, ascended by a ladder, holds three
tiny cot-beds, while beneath the choir and concealed by beautiful
draperies are stored the domestic and culinary paraphernalia,--pots,
pans, brushes, dishes, and, above all, the multiplicity of petroleum- and
spirit-stoves in which the Bohemian artistic soul delights. Ye Hutte is
an artist's studio, and its name may be found in all the exhibition
catalogues, for several generations of painters drift through it every
year. As one inmate rushes off to the Continent, the sea-shore, or the
mountains, another takes his place. Yet Ye Hutte holds scant place in
its real owner's esteem compared with that larger studio owned by all
the Dean artists in common, where all their summer's work is done, and
which is parquetted with grain-field gold and meadow emerald, walled
with rainbow horizons, and roofed with azure festooned with spun silk.
Ye Hutte is better appreciated as evening rendezvous for the
palette-bearing hosts, both male and female, who, sunbrowned and tired,
partake there of restful social converse as well as of the hospitable
cup that cheers. Evening after evening, by twos and threes, they sit in
the moonlight under the silver-touched vines and dewy blossoms of the
porch, listening to the far-away cry of night-birds, the murmur of
drowsy bells upon cattle stirring in sleep, or of human voices idealized
by remoteness into faint haunting music, while before them white light
touches the wooded heights of Cliefden,--distant heights full of
picturesque mystery and passionate history,--touches and idealizes into
a semblance of poetic realism the sham ruins of Hedsor, and spreads a
pearly sheen over the unseen Valley of the Shadow of Light through which
winds the quiet Thames.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|