To shorten the operation, sometimes I sat for both at the same time. Although neither was fully satisfied with the results of their labors, we had many pleasant hours together, discussing their art, their early trials, and artists in general. Each had good places in the Salon, and honorable mention that year. It is sad to see so many American girls and boys, who have no genius for painting or sculpture, spending their days in garrets, in solitude and poverty, with the vain hope of earning distinction. Women of all classes are awaking to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which the are fitted. In the Salon that year six thousand pictures were offered, and only two thousand accepted, and many of these were "skyed."
It was lovely on our balcony at night to watch the little boats, with their lights, sailing up and down the Seine, especially the day of the great annual fê;te,杢he 14th of July,杦hen the whole city was magnificently illuminated. We drove about the city on several occasions at midnight, to see the life杕en, women, and children enjoying the cool breezes, and the restaurants all crowded with people.
Sunday in Paris is charming杋t is the day for the masses of the people.
All the galleries of art, the libraries, concert halls, and gardens are open to them. All are dressed in their best, out driving, walking, and having picnics in the various parks and gardens; husbands, wives, and children laughing and talking happily together. The seats in the streets and parks are all filled with the laboring masses. The benches all over Paris朼long the curbstones in every street and highway杝how the care given to the comfort of the people. You will see mothers and nurses with their babies and children resting on these benches, laboring men eating their lunches and sleeping there at noon, the organ grinders and monkeys, too, taking their comfort.
In France you see men and women everywhere together; in England the men generally stagger about alone, caring more for their pipes and beer than their mothers, wives, and sisters. Social life, among the poor especially, is far more natural and harmonious in France than in England, because women mix more freely in business and amusements.
Coming directly from Paris to London, one is forcibly struck with the gloom of the latter city, especially at night. Paris with its electric lights is brilliant everywhere, while London, with its meager gas jets here and there struggling with the darkness, is as gloomy and desolate as Dore's pictures of Dante's Inferno. On Sunday, when the shops are closed, the silence and solitude of the streets, the general smoky blackness of the buildings and the atmosphere give one a melancholy impression of the great center of civilization. Now that it has been discovered that smoke can be utilized and the atmosphere cleared, it is astonishing that the authorities do not avail themselves of the discovery, and thus bring light and joy and sunshine into that city, and then clean the soot of centuries from their blackened buildings.
On my return to England I spent a day with Miss Emily Lord, at her kindergarten establishment. She had just returned from Sweden, where she spent six weeks in the carpenter's shop, studying the Swedish Slö;jd system, in which children of twelve years old learn to use tools, ****** spoons, forks, and other implements. Miss Lord showed us some of her work, quite creditable for her first attempts. She said the children in the higher grades of her school enjoyed the carpenter work immensely and became very deft in the use of tools.
On November 1, 1887, we reached Basingstoke once more, and found all things in order. My diary tells of several books I read during the winter and what the authors say of women; one the "Religio Medici," by Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., in which the author discourses on many high themes, God, Creation, Heaven, Hell, and vouchsafes one sentence on woman. Of her he says: "I was never married but once and commend their resolution who never marry twice, not that I disallow of second, nor in all cases of polygamy, which, considering the unequal number of the ***es, may also be necessary.
The whole world was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman.
Man is the whole world杢he breath of God; woman the rib and crooked piece of man. I speak not in prejudice nor am averse from that sweet ***, but naturally amorous of all that is beautiful. I can look all day at a handsome picture, though it be but a horse."
Turning to John Paul Friedrich Richter, I found in his chapter on woman many equally ridiculous statements mixed up with much fulsome admiration.
After reading some volumes of Richter, I took up Heinrich Heine, the German poet and writer. He said: "Oh, the women! we must forgive them much, for they love much and many. Their hate is, properly, only love turned inside out. Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can, in this way, gratify another man. When they write they have always one eye on the paper and the other eye on some man. This is true of all authoresses except the countess Hahn Hahn, who has only one eye." In John Ruskin's biography he gives us a glimpse of his timidity in regard to the ***, when a young man. He was very fond of the society of girls, but never knew how to approach them. He said he "was perfectly happy in serving them, would gladly make a bridge of himself for them to walk over, a beam to fasten a swing to for them朼nything but to talk to them." Such are some of the choice specimens of masculine wit I collected during my winter's reading!