The Coast of Bohemia | Page 3

in it the effects which he hoped to get again in his impression.
He saw the deep purples which he looked to see with eyes trained by
the French masters of his school to find them, and the indigo blues, the
intense greens, the rainbow oranges and scarlets; and he knew just how
he should give them. In the light of that vast afternoon sky, cloudless,
crystalline in its clearness, no brilliancy of rendering could be too bold.
If he had the courage of his convictions, this purely American event
could be reported on his canvas with all its native character; and yet it
could be made to appeal to the enlightened eye with the charm of a
French subject, and impressionism could be fully justified of its
follower in Pymantoning as well as in Paris. That golden dust along the
track; the level tops of the buggies drawn up within its ellipse, and the
groups scattered about in gypsy gayety on the grass there; the dark blur
of men behind the barrier; the women, with their bright hats and
parasols, massed flower-like,--all made him long to express them in
lines and dots and breadths of pure color. He had caught the vital effect
of the whole, and he meant to interpret it so that its truth should be felt
by all who had received the light of the new faith in painting, who
believed in the prismatic colors as in the ten commandments, and who
hoped to be saved by tone-contrasts. For the others, Ludlow was at that

day too fanatical an impressionist to care. He owed a duty to France no
less than to America, and he wished to fulfil it in a picture which
should at once testify to the excellence of the French method and the
American material. At twenty-two, one is often much more secure and
final in one's conclusions than one is afterwards.
He was vexed that a lingering doubt of the subject had kept him from
bringing a canvas with him at once, and recording his precious first
glimpses of it. But he meant to come to the trotting-match the next day
again, and then he hoped to get back to his primal impression of the
scene, now so vivid in his mind. He made his way down the benches,
and out of the enclosure of the track. He drew a deep breath, full of the
sweet smell of the bruised grass, forsaken now by nearly all the feet
that had trodden it. A few old farmers, who had failed to get places
along the railing and had not cared to pay for seats on the stand, were
loitering about, followed by their baffled and disappointed wives. The
men occasionally stopped at the cattle-pens, but it was less to look at
the bulls and boars and rams which had taken the premiums, and wore
cards or ribbons certifying the fact, than to escape a consciousness of
their partners, harassingly taciturn or voluble in their reproach. A
number of these embittered women brokenly fringed the piazza of the
fair-house, and Ludlow made his way toward them with due sympathy
for their poor little tragedy, so intelligible to him through the memories
of his own country-bred youth. He followed with his pity those who
sulked away through the deserted aisles of the building, and nursed
their grievance among the prize fruits and vegetables, and the fruits and
vegetables that had not taken the prizes. They were more censorious
than they would have been perhaps if they had not been defeated
themselves; he heard them dispute the wisdom of most of the awards as
the shoutings and clappings from the racetrack penetrated the lonely
hall. They creaked wearily up and down in their new shoes or best
shoes, and he knew how they wished themselves at home and in bed,
and wondered why they had ever been such fools as to come, anyway.
Occasionally, one of their husbands lagged in, as if in search of his wife,
but kept at a safe distance, after seeing her, or hung about with a group
of other husbands, who could not be put to shame or suffering as they
might if they had appeared singly.

II.
Ludlow believed that if the right fellow ever came to the work, he
could get as much pathos out of our farm folks as Millet got out of his
Barbizon peasants. But the fact was that he was not the fellow; he
wanted to paint beauty not pathos; and he thought, so far as he thought
ethically about it, that, the Americans needed to be shown the festive
and joyous aspects of their common life. To discover and to represent
these was his pleasure as an artist, and his duty as a citizen. He
suspected,