Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

nual session. The country is divided into eighteen nomarchies, or provinces.

The administration of the government is in the hands of the cabinet, of which M. Tricoupis, the most statesmanlike Greek of the century, is the president. He is Minister of Finance and War. He was put into power on a platform of reform, high taxation, and reduction of the debt. He is more secure in his position than any previous prime minister of Greece, and Greek political affairs have never been so wisely managed.

The civil service has been as bad as it well could be. Not only every postmaster, but every school-teacher and forester has expected dismissal at the accession of a new ministry. The numerous men who wanted office labored to overthrow the cabinet, with no principles at stake, but moved simply by desire for office. Thus the administration was changed two or three times in a single year, and the most valuable government officials preferred to take places in private business, where their work would be harder and their pay less, but where the situation would be more perma

nent.

The expenses of the government are about twenty million dollars annually, including interest on the public debt. Heavy taxes and duties are imposed. About one-fourth of the revenue is derived from import duties, which are sufficient to defray the cost of the army of 27,000 men. The public debt amounts to more than one hundred million dollars. This is a load and a grievance. Of the early loans, half a century ago, only a small part actually reached Greece and was used for her benefit.

The frontier fixed for Greece by the Protecting Powers was never satisfactory to her. More Greeks remained outside of her limits than were included in her kingdom. The treaty of Berlin, in 1878, granted to Greece a "rectification of the frontier," giving her Thessaly and Epirus with 500,000 new inhabitants. But Turkey declined to surrender the territory. In 1880 the Berlin Congress met again and determined the new boundaries, after careful study of the mountain ranges, water-courses, and strategic conditions.

Turkey again temporized. France and England disagreed as to methods of procedure with Turkey, and did nothing. At last, in 1881, Greece secured only a little more than half of the territory which had been granted to her by the Powers, three years before. She gained Thessaly, but not Epirus.

Constantinople is written on the heart of the Greeks. They desire to be the successors of the sick Turk. This they do not require immediately; but they would like to gain Epirus and Crete, at once. They claim the lands inhabited by Greeks. The better informed among them know that Greece alone is no match for Turkey, whose armies have been trained in war, while no Greek officer has had any experience in actual battle; but they seek for diplomatic combinations which will secure them their end.

Only a few years ago the critics of Greece were fond of saying that she had failed to improve her freedom, and had made but little progress. This criticism is no longer just. The constitutional government of Greece really dates only from 1864, and her king was then not yet twenty years old. Since 1870, the advance has been very rapid. The country now has more miles of railway than it then had of common highway; bridges have been built, harbors have been improved, the canal across the isthmus has been dug, preparations are making to drain marshes. The number of acres of ground devoted to agriculture has largely increased. The population of Athens has doubled. Many Greek families which have long resided out of Greece are now returning to their country, bringing with them both energy and capital. The people are better educated. Extensive archæological excavations have been conducted; the museums have been enriched. The land has been made far more attractive and accessible to foreigners. Brigandage has been put down. The kingdom is ruled by a ministry more prudent and more firmly established than any which have preceded. The land is still suffering from poverty and from bad political habits; but with the frugality and temperance of the people, it must gain wealth, dignity, and authority.

A LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN

WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART.

By Robert Louis Stevenson.

[graphic]

ITH the agreeable there be any exception-and here desfrankness of tiny steps in-it is in those moyouth, you ad- ments when, wearied or surfeited of the dress me on a primary activity of the senses, he calls point of some up before memory the image of transpractical impor- acted pains and pleasures. Thus it is tance to yourself that such an one shies from all cut-andand (it is even dry professions, and inclines insensibly conceivable) of toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and recording of experience.

some gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision; and I will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ars artium and common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with

the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candor of mind, to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is it worth doing? -when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candor of the one and the ardor of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.

If you recognize in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room for hesitation follow your bent. And observe (lest. I should too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be engrossed in that beloved occupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and delighted industry, many thousand artists

spend their lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: A thousand artists, and never one work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct returns-the wages of the trade-are small, but the indirect

the wages of the life are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon him and words are not wanting -in what a continual series of small successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labors in a craft to which the whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honor. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you

are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavors. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects the gross mass of the public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character; it is for this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made. And first, if you are to continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who says "It will do," is on the downward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the practice of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish. This is the danger on the one side; there is not less upon the other. The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very hard to attain, making or swallowing artistic formulæ, or perhaps falling in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget the end of all art: to please. It is doubt

less tempting to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services that he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcendental honesty. To give the public what they do not want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. The first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent-character. he, be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art, and follow some more manly way of life.

Or if

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must be frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiard markers. The French have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man. Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the high honor; and anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that as

sembly. There should be no honors for the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the rewards of life; the honors are preempted for other trades, more laborious and perhaps more useful.

tion and comfort are most needful, the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a great age without dishonorable failure. The writer has the double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts directly to a false position.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to produce a certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in which (we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist For the writer (in spite of notorious steps forth out of the crowd and pro- examples to the contrary) must look to poses to delight: an impudent design, be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montépin in which it is impossible to fail without make handsome livelihoods; but we canodious circumstances. The poor Daugh- not all hope to be Tennyson, and we do ter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery not all perhaps desire to be Montépin. quite unregarded through the crowd, If you adopt an art to be your trade, makes a figure which it is impossible weed your mind at the outset of all deto recall without a wounding pity. She sire of money. What you may decently is the type of the unsuccessful artist. expect, if you have some talent and The actor, the dancer, and the singer much industry, is such an income as a must appear like her in person, and clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps drain publicly the cup of failure. But a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor though the rest of us escape this crown- have you the right to look for more; in ing bitterness of the pillory, we all court the wages of the life, not in the wages of in essence the same humiliation. We the trade, lies your reward; the work is all profess to be able to delight. And here the wages. It will be seen I have how few of us are! We all pledge our little sympathy with the common lamenselves to be able to continue to delight. tations of the artist class. Perhaps they And the day will come to each, and even do not remember the hire of the field to the most admired, when the ardor laborer; or do they think no parallel shall have declined and the cunning will lie? Perhaps they have never obshall be lost, and he shall sit by his de- served what is the retiring allowance of serted booth ashamed. Then shall he a field officer; or do they suppose their see himself condemned to do work for contributions to the arts of pleasing which he blushes to take payment. more important than the services of a Then (as if his lot were not already colonel? Perhaps they forget on how cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes little Millet was content to live; or do of the wreckers of the press, who earn a they think, because they have less genlittle bitter bread by the condemnation ius, they stand excused from the display of trash which they have not read, and of equal virtues? But upon one point the praise of excellence which they can- there should be no dubiety: if a man be not understand. not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he be not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of le vieux saltimbanque; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended; for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les Bleus (for instance) is of an order of merit very different from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne; Denis Duval is not written with the pen of Esmond; and if any gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I think is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupaこ

« AnkstesnisTęsti »