International studio (59.1916)

Charles F. Bittinger—Versailles Interiors

tie, to wake him to a sense of his responsibility.
The method usually followed is this:
You will find that he knows exactly what is
beautiful and what is not. He will not hesitate
to give a shape to the deity.
So you deliberately choose such material as
your patient has been taught by all the rules of
academies and critics to be entirely ugly and
beyond the pale of art. You use these things and
nothing else in your work. You simply riddle
him with what he calls discords of sound or colour.
You spit on his two supports, Realism and Ro-
mance, and anoint his eyes with the result: you
show your utter contempt, that is, for all that
he holds beautiful. But unless you have also
used this drastic method for a well-known reason,
unless you know what you are about and have
opened his eyes thereby to see that the true beauty
is apart from these things and resident in the sub-
ject they imperfectly reveal; woe unto you.
It will be noted that in this artistic method you
neither accept “things as they are,” nor do you
construct things as you think they ought to be.
You take things as they appear to your audience
(not, necessarily to you), and with these for brick
and mortar you build a palace whose beauty de-
pends entirely on its intelligent proportion and
economical planning that hints at its invisible
purpose, and not at all on brick and mortar.
You may say that these were necessary to it:
but that is not so; they were only necessary to
the density of your audience. The palace existed
in your thought before it could be built, and the
building of it, the brick and mortar, detract from
rather than enhance its beauty. The idea had
to be made flesh because only in that way could
it be expressed to your audience, but it was in
no way dependent on that for its existence. You
might demolish your brick palace (giving much
incidental delight to Mr. Muirhead Bone) and in
three days there it might be again, possibly in
concrete and steel . . . but once thought, you
could not in the demolition touch the palatial
idea.
It must be admitted that your palace will be
the despair of all bricklayers, for it has to be true
on all planes, and you have to know how to use
bricks, involving an apprenticeship possibly of
thirty years, if your work is important, before
you can start to build.
And this is a great mystery, before which the
veils, for most of us, are still drawn close.


LA CHEMINEE BLEU—MUSEE
CARNAVALETTE

BY CHARLES F.
BITTINGER

CHARLES F. BITTINGER—VER-
SAILLES INTERIORS
BY FLLOYD W. TRIGGS
“At the very start,” sententiously
says Everett L. Warner, “Fame set her mark
upon Bittinger by having him born in Washing-
ton, D. C.; for, while a great many people go
to Washington, very few people are born there.”
Having allowed Mr. Warner gracefully to intro-
duce the subject of this sketch, it will be neces-
sary, for the purposes of the story, to step from
America into France and to slip backward a few
hundred years in history.
When Louis XIII first beheld the swampy flat
country which lies about twelve miles southwest
of Paris at the place now famous as Versailles,
there seemed little to recommend the spot as one
of royal residence. However, for reasons best
known to himself,- he built a chateau there and
in due time his son, Louis XIV, reigned in his
stead. It is recorded of Louis XIV that, pos-
sessed of no great intellectual power himself, he
yet had the faculty of recognizing capacity in
others and of employing it for his own aggran-
dizement. He sought great architects, painters,
sculptors, cabinet makers, decorators, landscape
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