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Page 13
To the usual artistic circle of Ye Hutte is often added a not
uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within
the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism
of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come
up sometimes from London, bringing with them an atmosphere of
publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional
gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the
capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers,
theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to
order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of
Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean
shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up
for the winter.
The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom
artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then,
for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a
party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom
with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while
bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and
onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however,
the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists,
numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the
majority of their kind have flown.
The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too
many to be specified. In a collection of various nationalities, many of
whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair
earth, how could it well be otherwise? It may be observed, however, that
here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where
habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is
_not_, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, _en r�gle_ to
vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge
acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three
Golden Balls.
Once upon a time, in a Barbizon _auberge_, a certain famous artist and
incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident
of his releasing a friend's valuables from durance.
"The moment I turned in at the Mont de Pi�t�," he said, "_my_ watch took
fright, and stopped ticking on the spot."
That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Pi�t�,
found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye
Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned
from corn-field and meadow.
During the short halt the Bohemian's watch was so largely and frequently
_en �vidence_ as to attract attention.
"Yes," he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, "I've just got it
back from a two-years' visit to 'my uncle'."
Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.
"What time is it, Mr. S----?" asked Sophia Primrose, amiably disposed to
resuscitate a forlorn joke.
A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian. For Dean propriety was
already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at
having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the
house-top,--that his watch was again with his "uncle."
Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely
beyond the dread of yet eating "mad cow" travel third-class. But Dean
artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip
quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets
are other than at least second. Our Bohemian was once presented with a
second-class ticket to London. As he scrambled in upon the unwonted
luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.
"The first time we ever travelled second-class in our lives," murmured
Materfamilias.
"I too," responded the cheeky Bohemian.
Another difference between Dean Bohemianism and Continental is
characteristic of the whole race whose land this is. Whereas artists in
France, Italy, and Germany are of gregarious habit and gather for their
summers in rural inns, where they form a community by themselves, the
Dean artist sets up his own vine and fig-tree and has a temporary home,
if ever so small and mean. The farm-houses and cottages of the Dean are
filled with lodgers, all dining at separate tables and living as aloof
from each other as the true Briton always lives. There are advantages in
this aloofness, but it certainly lacks the _camaraderie_, the jolly
good-fellowship, of those picturesque _auberges_ and _osterie_ where
twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof,
meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free,
artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and
adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every
artistic theory possible to the sane and insane mind.
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