Of course rich men collect pictures. I'm not denying that. But they do it, generally, for the same reason they collect butlers and footmen--because tradition says it is the proper thing to do. And I have observed in the course of my meanderings that they are almost invariably better judges of butlers than of paintings. That is because their butlers are really and truly more important to them--excepting as their paintings have financial value. Still, if the world is full of so-called art collectors who don't know what they're doing, let us not think of them too harshly, for there are also painters who do not know what they are doing, and it is necessary that some one should support them.
Otherwise they would starve, and a bad painter should not have to do that--starvation being an honor reserved by tradition for the truly great.
Very keenly I feel the futility of an attempt to tell of Mr. Freer in a few paragraphs. He should be dealt with as Mark Twain was dealt with by that prince of biographers, Albert Bigelow Paine; some one should live with him through the remainder of his life--always sympathetic and appreciative, always ready to draw him out, always with a notebook. It should be some one just like Paine, and as there isn't some one just like Paine, it should be Paine himself.
Probably as a development of his original interest in Whistler, Mr.
Freer has, of late years, devoted himself almost entirely to ancient Oriental art--sculptures, paintings, ceramics, bronzes, textiles, lacquers and jades. The very rumor that in some little town in the interior of China was an old vase finer than any other known vase of the kind, has been enough to set him traveling. Many of his greatest treasures he has unearthed, bargained for and acquired at first hand, in remote parts of the globe. He bearded Whistler in his den--that is a story by itself. He purchased Whistler's famous Peacock Room, brought it to this country and set it up in his own house. He traveled on elephant-back through the jungles of India and Java in search of buried temples; to Egypt for Biblical manuscripts and potteries, and to the nearer East, years ago, in quest of the now famous "lustered glazes." He made many trips to Japan, in early days, to study, in ancient temples and private collections, the fine arts of China, Corea and Japan, and was the first American student to visit the rock-hewn caves of central China, with their thousands of specimens of early sculpture--sculpture ranking, Mr. Freer says, with the best sculpture of the world.
The photographs and rubbings of these objects made under Mr. Freer's personal supervision have greatly aided students, all over the globe.
Every important public library in this country and abroad has been presented by Mr. Freer with fac-similes of the Biblical manuscripts discovered by him in Egypt about seven years ago, so far as these have been published. The original manuscripts will ultimately go to the National Gallery, at Washington.
Mr. Freer's later life has been one long treasure hunt. Now he will be pursuing a pair of mysterious porcelains around the earth, catching up with them in China, losing them, finding them again in Japan, or in New York, or Paris; now discovering in some unheard-of Chinese town a venerable masterpiece, painted on silk, which has been rolled into a ball for a child's plaything. The placid pleasures of conventional collecting, through the dealers, is not the thing that Mr. Freer loves.
He loves the chase.
You should see him handle his ceramics. You should hear him talk of them! He _knows_. And though you do not know, you know he knows. More, he is willing to explain. For, though his intolerance is great, it is not directed so much at honest ignorance as against meretricious art.
The names of ancient Chinese painters, of emperors who practised art centuries ago, of dynasties covering thousands of years, of Biblical periods, flow kindly from his lips:
"This dish is Grecian. It was made five hundred years before the birth of Christ. This is a Chinese marble, but you see it has a Persian scroll in high relief. And this bronze urn: it is perhaps the oldest piece I have--about four thousand years--it is Chinese.
But do you see this border on it? Perfect Greek! Where did the Chinese get that? Art is universal. We may call an object Greek, or Roman, or Assyrian, or Chinese, or Japanese, but as we begin to understand, we find that other races had the same thing--identical forms and designs. Take, for example, this painting of Whistler's, 'The Gold Screen.' You see he uses the Tosa design. The Tosa was used in Japan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and down to about twenty years ago. But there wasn't a single example of it in Europe in 1864, when Whistler painted 'The Gold Screen'; and Whistler had not been to the Orient. Then, where did he get the Tosa design? He invented it. It came to him because he was a great artist, and art is universal."
It was like that--the spirit of it. And you must imagine the words spoken with measured distinctness in a deep, resonant voice, by a man with whom art is a religion and the pursuit of it a passion. He has a nature full of fire. At the mention of the name of the late J. P.
Morgan, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or of certain Chinese collectors and painters of the distant past, a sort of holy flame of admiration rose and kindled in him. His contempt is also fire. A minor eruption occurred when the automobile industry was spoken of; a Vesuvian flare which reddened the sky and left the commercialism of the city in smoking ruins. But it was not until I chanced to mention the Detroit Museum of Art--an institution of which Mr. Freer strongly disapproves--that the great outburst came. His wrath was like an overpowering revolt of nature. A whirlwind of tempestuous fire mounted to the heavens and the museum emerged a clinker.
He went to our heads. We four, who saw and heard him, left Mr. Freer's house drunk with the esthetic. Even the flooding knowledge of our own barbarian ignorance was not enough to sober us. Some of the flame had gotten into us. It was like old brandy. We waved our arms and cried out about art. For there is in a truly big human being--especially in one old enough to have seemed to gain perspective on the universe--some quality which touches something in us that nothing else can ever reach.
It is something which is not admiration only, nor vague longing to emulate, nor a quickened comprehension of the immensity of things; something emotional and spiritual and strange and indescribable which seems to set our souls to singing.
The Freer collection will go, ultimately, to the Smithsonian Institution (the National Gallery) in Washington, a fact which is the cause of deep regret to many persons in Detroit, more especially since the City Plan and Improvement Commission has completed arrangements for a Center of Arts and Letters--a fine group plan which will assemble and give suitable setting to a new Museum of Art, Public Library, and other buildings of like nature, including a School of Design and an Orchestra Hall. The site for the new gallery of art was purchased with funds supplied by public-spirited citizens, and the city has given a million dollars toward the erection of the building. Plans for the library have been drawn by Cass Gilbert.
It seems possible that, had the new art museum been started sooner, and with some guarantee of competent management, Mr. Freer might have considered it as an ultimate repository for his treasures. But now it is too late. That the present art museum--the old one--was not to be considered by him, is perfectly obvious. Inside and out it is unworthy.
It looks as much like an old waterworks as the new waterworks out on Jefferson Avenue looks like a museum. Its foyer contains some sculptured busts, forming the most amazing group I have ever seen. The group represents, I take it, prominent citizens of Detroit--among them, according to my recollection, the following: Hermes, Augustus Caesar, Mr.
Bela Hubbard, Septimus Severus, the Hon. T. W. Palmer, Mr. Frederick Stearns, Apollo, Demosthenes, and the Hon. H. P. Lillibridge.
I do not want to put things into people's heads, but--the old museum is not fire-proof. God speed the new one!
CHAPTER VII
THE MaeCENAS OF THE MOTOR
The great trouble with Detroit, from my point of view, is that there is too much which should be mentioned: Grosse Pointe with its rich setting and rich homes; the fine new railroad station; the "Cabbage Patch"; the "Indian Village" (so called because the streets bear Indian names) with its examples of modest, pleasing, domestic architecture. Then there are the boulevards, the fine Wayne County roads, the clubs--the Country Club, the Yacht Club, the Boat Club, the Detroit Club, the University Club, all with certain individuality. And there is the unique little Yondatega Club of which Theodore Roosevelt said: "It is beyond all doubt the best club in the country."
Also there is Henry Ford.
I suppose there is no individual having to do with manufacturing of any kind whose name is at present more familiar to the world. But in all this ocean of publicity which has resulted from Mr. Ford's development of a reliable, cheap car, from the stupefying growth of his business and his fortune, and more recently from his sudden distribution among his working people of ten million dollars of profits from his business--in all this publicity I have seen nothing that gave me a clear idea of Henry Ford himself. I wanted to see him--to assure myself that he was not some fabulous being out of a Detroit saga. I wanted to know what kind of man he was to look at and to listen to.
The Ford plant is far, far out on Woodward Avenue. It is so gigantic that there is no use wasting words in trying to express its vastness; so full of people, all of them working for Ford, that a thousand or two more or less would make no difference in the looks of things. And among all those people there was just one man I really wanted to see, and just one man I really wanted not to see. I wanted to see Henry Ford and I wanted not to see a man named Liebold, because, they say, if you see Liebold first you never do see Ford. That is what Liebold is for. He is the man whose business in life it is to know where Henry Ford _isn't_.
To get into Mr. Ford's presence is an undertaking. It is not easy even to find out whether he is there. Liebold is so zealous in his protection that he even protects Mr. Ford from his own employees. Thus, when the young official who had my companion and me in charge, received word over the office telephone that Mr. Ford was not in the building, he didn't believe it. He went on a quiet scouting expedition of his own before he was convinced. Presently he returned to the office in which he had deposited us.
"No; he really isn't here just now," he said. "He'll be in presently.
Come on; I'll take you through the plant."
The machine shop is one room, with a glass roof, covering an area of something less than thirty acres. It is simply unbelievable in its size, its noise and its ghastly furious activity. It was peopled when we were there by five thousand men--the day shift in that one shop alone. (The total force of workmen was something like three times that number.)
Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind, unaccustomed to such things, the whole room, with its interminable aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population--to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium.
Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms--of men, machinery and movement--add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell--imagine all of this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a vague conception of that place.
Fancy all this riot going on at once; then imagine the effect of its suddenly ceasing. For that is what it did. The wheels slowed down and became still. The belts stopped flapping. The machines lay dead. The noise faded to a murmur; then to utter silence. Our ears rang with the quiet. The aisles all at once were full of men in overalls, each with a paper package or a box. Some of them walked swiftly toward the exits.
Others settled down on piles of automobile parts, or the bases of machines, to eat, like grimy soldiers on a battlefield. It was the lull of noon.
I was glad to leave the machine shop. It dazed me. I should have liked to leave it some time before I actually did, but the agreeable young enthusiast who was conducting us delighted in explaining things--shouting the explanations in our ears. Half of them I could not hear; the other half I could not comprehend. Here and there I recognized familiar automobile parts--great heaps of them--cylinder castings, crank cases, axles. Then as things began to get a little bit coherent, along would come a train of cars hanging insanely from a single overhead rail, the man in the cab tooting his shrill whistle; whereupon I would promptly retire into mental fog once more, losing all sense of what things meant, feeling that I was not in any factory, but in a Gargantuan lunatic asylum where fifteen thousand raving, tearing maniacs had been given full authority to go ahead and do their damnedest.
In that entire factory there was for me but one completely lucid spot.
That was the place where cars were being assembled. There I perceived the system. No sooner had axle, frame, and wheels been joined together than the skeleton thus formed was attached, by means of a short wooden coupling, to the rear end of a long train of embryonic automobiles, which was kept moving slowly forward toward a far-distant door. Beside this train of chassis stood a row of men, and as each succeeding chassis came abreast of him, each man did something to it, bringing it just a little further toward completion. We walked ahead beside the row of moving partially-built cars, and each car we passed was a little nearer to its finished state than was the one behind it. Just inside the door we paused and watched them come successively into first place in the line. As they moved up, they were uncoupled. Gasoline was fed into them from one pipe, oil from another, water from still another.
Then as a man leaped to the driver's seat, a machine situated in the floor spun the back wheels around, causing the motor to start; whereupon the little Ford moved out into the wide, wide world, a completed thing, propelled by its own power.
In a glass shed of the size of a small exposition building the members of the Ford staff park their little cars. It was in this shed that we discovered Mr. Ford. He had just driven in (in a Ford!) and was standing beside it--the god out of the machine.
"Nine o'clock to-morrow morning," he said to me in reply to my request for an appointment.
I may have shuddered slightly. I know that my companion shuddered, and that, for one brief instant, I felt a strong desire to intimate to Mr.
Ford that ten o'clock would suit me better. But I restrained myself.
Inwardly I argued thus: "I am in the presence of an amazing man--a prince of industry--the Maecenas of the motor car. Here is a man who, they say, makes a million dollars a month, even in a short month like February. Probably he makes a million and a quarter in the thirty-one-day months when he has time to get into the spirit of the thing. I wish to pay a beautiful tribute to this man, not because he has more money than I have--I don't admit that he has--but because he conserves his money better than I conserve mine. It is for that that I take off my hat to him, even if I have to get up and dress and be away out here on Woodward Avenue by 9 A. M. to do it."
Furthermore, I thought to myself that Mr. Ford was the kind of business man you read about in novels; one who, when he says "nine," doesn't mean five minutes after nine, but nine sharp. If you aren't there your chance is gone. You are a ruined man.
[Illustration: Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium]
"Very well," I said, trying to speak in a natural tone, "we will be on hand at nine."
Then he went into the building, and my companion and I debated long as to how the feat should be accomplished. He favored sitting up all night in order to be safe about it, but we compromised at last on sitting up only a little more than half the night.
The cold, dismal dawn of the day following found us shaved and dressed.
We went out to the factory. It was a long, chilly, expensive, silent taxi ride. At five minutes before nine we were there. The factory was there. The clerks were there. Fourteen thousand one hundred and eighty-seven workmen were there--those workmen who divided the ten millions--everything and every one was there with a single exception.
And that exception was Mr. Henry Ford.
True, he did come at last. True, he talked with us. But he was not there at nine o'clock, nor yet at ten. Nor do I blame him. For if I were in the place of Mr. Henry Ford, there would be just one man whom I should meet at nine o'clock, and that man would be Meadows, my faithful valet.