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Show Happy Christmas for Aged Artist Finds Fairy Spirit Shines Behind Gloom and Cold of the World. By CHRISTOPHER Q. HAZARD ORECT as ever, and striking hi; i cane sharply upon SMjlf' JS the pavement ai "m he strode along, E?S2iS the old man was &flZ$r2P Ji figure amid tlio hurrying Christmas Christ-mas crowds. He pressed on like contradiction of the Christmas spirt. He had not far to go before reaching reach-ing the ancient looking house that had once known youth and gayety as the result of his prosperity, but, which In Its loneliness and disrepair, hail become be-come a surviving sympathy In his htter and adverse experiences. There-he There-he could sit and renew In memory the events and associations of happier days, which, like pictures in the gallery gal-lery of life, were vivid again for a moment out of their tarnished frames. They were more real than the pictures pic-tures that hung upon his walls, for it Is the artistic atmosphere of the day that determines the light In which Its art shall be viewed, and these worku of the past had become only memorials to the present to which he had come. ! But the present realities of the past ; are as helpless as the old-fasbloned-nesses of the present to succor fainting mortality, and the old artist had to confess on that Christmas eve that he was not only hungry, but rather hopelessly hope-lessly so. It was true that his artistic remains were not wholly despised. Mr. Blavatsky's auction room was not very far away, and there was a daily slaughter of helpless pictures there. But this massacre of Innocents their father could not consent to : he felt ready to starve first. Then certain publishers had offered something for a set of skeletons, but In order that they might reproduce them upon a reduced re-duced scale, which was Intolerable to his artistic pride. So that "The Solitary Soli-tary Pine" whispered to "The Old Meeting House" that It looked as though they would all go down togeth- Lv snmw j The Old Artist Had to Confess That ) He Was Hungry. er, and "The Mountain Summit" suggested sug-gested to "An Evening Sea" that it might be better to stoop to conquer. I There was no token of this last idea, however. In the preparations for tlia nignt that slgnltied the old man s intention in-tention of remaining In and siieking the slruatlon out. He hod no ear for the chimes that had begun to ring out. There was not a trace or" expectation expecta-tion of Christmas cheer in the determined deter-mined expression oi :iie face t'"at wf reflected from the oW mirror. They must all helonw to the past forever. There was another ilu-ii-it o:i t way, though, and it found exrrt .-U a that Christmas morning when '.he artist ar-tist awoke to a rather rtif'.os environment en-vironment ;o be summoned to his by the loud knocking of a wry rotund, florid and merry individual, who seemed to have brought his years v.i'h him into a congenial and friendly climate. cli-mate. An old friend from a far country, coun-try, he took In the state of things at a glance and as quickly decided upon his course of action. After the greetings greet-ings and the historical rereuntings were over, and as a result of this most unexpected visitation, a number of the paintings that had concluded to die were lutroduced to a new life upon the walls of one who had never lost his love for them, and it appeared that the one aim of their new possessor had been to get them at their maker's prices. All of which gave to the old artist a new view of the fact thai while the arts may change, hearts do not; and a new Idea of the reaipy which all art strives in vain to fully represent, the reality of the fairy spirit that moves and shines behind all the gloom and cold of the world. "I'll be hanged," he said, "if he didn't look just ' like Santa Claus." j (, 1925, Western Newspaper Union.) |
