From Seven to Seventy
❦
[Illustration:
EDWARD SIMMONS: IN 1893
]
FROM
SEVEN TO SEVENTY
Memories of a Painter and a Yankee
_By Edward Simmons_
With an Interruption by
OLIVER HERFORD
FULLY ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
_Publishers_
HARPER & BROTHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
FROM SEVEN TO SEVENTY
Copyright, 1922
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
C-Y
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTERRUPTION ix
INTRODUCTION.—A YANKEE HERITAGE xiii
I. MAKING MY EARLY HISTORY.—CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1
II. FINDING MY WINGS.—HARVARD COLLEGE 24
III. IN SEARCH OF A CAREER.—OUT WEST 43
IV. ON BEING A TENDERFOOT.—NORTH OF CALIFORNIA 76
V. ADVENTURES IN ÆSTHETICISM.—PARIS AND STUDENT DAYS 117
VI. THE MIDDLE AGES.—BRITTANY; SPAIN 141
VII. FROM BRETON TO BRITON.—ST. IVES, CORNWALL; LONDON 162
VIII. SUMMER ADVENTURINGS.—I. CARRIÈRE ST. DENISE. II. BARBIZON. III. MONTREUIL. IV. GREZ. V. STUTTGART 184
IX. FIRST DECORATIONS 202
X. DEMOCRACY AND THE FINE ARTS 219
XI. STANFORD WHITE 237
XII. FINE ARTS IN RELATION TO “A NUMBER OF THINGS” 256
XIII. THE PLAYERS 279
XIV. AMERICAN HUMOR 303
XV. PAINT AND PAINTERS 321
XVI. IN RETROSPECT 342
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece_
Etching by Will Simmons, from a photograph by Benjamin
Kimball
THE OLD MANSE AT CONCORD _Facing p._ 2
SARAH ALDEN (BRADFORD) RIPLEY „ 10
EDWARD SIMMONS AT THE AGE OF SEVEN „ 16
MARY EMERSON (RIPLEY) SIMMONS „ 22
“THE CARPENTER’S SON” „ 178
“JUSTICE” „ 212
“THE THREE FATES” „ 218
“MELPOMENE” „ 236
“JANUARY” „ 258
“THE RETURN OF THE FLAGS” „ 272
“CLEANSING THE SOIL OF THE BAD ELEMENTS” „ 330
EDWARD SIMMONS AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY „ 340
Interruption
If some curious reader, chancing upon this foreword to the narrative of
the life of Edward Simmons, should require my reason for calling it an
Interruption instead of an Introduction, I might reply with the obvious
evasion that so distinguished a painter as Edward Simmons needs no
introduction.
The recipient of medals innumerable, and the most flattering mention in
every European capital, surely should need no introduction even in his
own country, many of whose public buildings and galleries are enriched
by examples of his work in decoration, portraiture, or genre.
But this, as I have said, would be an evasion and not my true reason for
calling my preface an interruption, and since the curiosity that can
drive a reader to the perusal of matter that is essentially deterrent,
wholly superfluous, and probably dull must be of a persistence that will
brook no gainsay, I will make a virtue of compulsion and narrate for
that reader’s private enlightenment a story of a very personal nature
concerning Mr. Simmons, the telling of which I had rather hoped to
avoid.
The story, in so far as it is related to the title of this preface,
speaks for itself, and since it bears upon a personal characteristic of
the painter, inherited, I am told, from generations of oratorical
forebears, a characteristic which also speaks for itself, I must ask the
reader to regard it as strictly confidential and to allow it to go no
further.
Picture then, Curious Reader, a Boston dinner party at which Mr. Edward
Simmons as guest of honor is exercising without let or hindrance the
lingual accomplishment bequeathed to him by generations of eloquent
forebears, and demonstrating to a fresh audience that the supposed “lost
art of conversation” was not so much lost as cornered.
A dinner party, however, even a Boston dinner party, has in addition to
its social and intellectual side a practical, alimentary aspect not to
be ignored by anyone, particularly an artist. And since the act of
obtaining nourishment employs the function of swallowing, and the
function of swallowing cannot be successfully synchronized with that of
speech, there were of necessity occasional brief pauses in the flow of
oratory.
It was at the moment of one of these unavoidable pauses that a lady (to
be remembered, as was the “clergyman” who interrupted Dr. Johnson, only
by her temerity) seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
Now the traffic laws that regulate the respective movements of the human
pharynx and larynx are as inexorable as those that govern our public
highways, and at the same instant that the lady opened her mouth to
speak, the Edwardian larynx resumed its right of way.
“Oh, pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I interrupted you,” was all she could
manage to gasp.
“Madam,” replied Simmons, with the Chesterfieldian smile the gift of
which many an Academician would give all his decorations to
possess—“madam, no one can _speak_ without interrupting me!”
And that is why I have chosen to call my impertinent preface to a
narrative which for human interest can (to my thinking) be compared only
to that of Benvenuto Cellini, an— But pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I am
interrupting you!
OLIVER HERFORD.
Introduction
_A Yankee Heritage_
For years I have wanted to make two cartoons—the first, dated 1800, to
be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, “New England with
Her Child America.” In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England,
is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a
carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black
cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to
grab the reins. He yells:
“Ma, if you don’t stop that there will be trouble!”
I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was
still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years,
until, without his mother’s realizing it, he has slipped quietly from
home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a
toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is
still the young mother of the cartoon.
My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who
embarked upon the _Mayflower_ in search of a far-off land where they
might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who
came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year
were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in
prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people
who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have
never been able to find that this pure English lineage had been broken
during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for
centuries before that in the old country.
From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred
of kings; a lack of rhythm—the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule
the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred
of restraint in any form.
From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I
possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee
handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his
sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he
saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in
one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of
my birth: “I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce
the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear
upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel
Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke
Webster.”
My father died before I was old enough to know him, but I got quite a
vivid picture of his side of the family from a distant relative whom I
met by accident one day. He said: “The Simmonses have always been a
long-legged set of lazy galoots. We have had great success with the
other sex. We have been able to do one thing a little better than other
folks and stick to it until we have about a thousand dollars—then we sit
down and loaf until it is gone.”
Mother was different. When she was a girl she had a serious talk with
her dad, telling him it was foolish for her to study piano or music of
any kind.
“What is your ambition?” he asked.
“To scrub a kitchen floor better than anyone else,” she replied; and he
succumbed, his New England nature realizing that, after all, it might be
well to have one practical person in the family. Mother’s thrifty streak
came in very useful, for a young widow with four lusty children to feed
did not have an easy time in those days. The sun never rose upon her
asleep and her small economies were ever her own pride and the butt of
our selfish derision. After her day’s work was over, it was my
delight—little brute that I was—to lie in bed and listen to her voice,
reading to me from some story of delicious adventure. When her head
drooped and the book fell from her hands, I, still wide awake, would
whine and finally yell, until she pulled herself together and went on.
Mother’s day was an endless round of doing something for others.
From the land where these first American ancestors of mine settled so
long ago, I get the shape of my body and the contour of my face. I look
more like an Iroquois Indian than an Englishman. Some historian has
remarked that the change in the Yankee is due to intermarriage with the
redskins. Imagine the spectacle of a staid Governor Bradford wedded to
an Indian squaw! Two hundred years of the same climate, the same food,
and the same life produced the same type, that’s all.
From Seven to Seventy
“Mon verre n’est pas grand
Mais je bois dans mon verre.”
ALFRED DE MUSSET
Chapter I: Making My Early History
_Concord, Massachusetts_
There may have been much distinction in living in Concord,
Massachusetts, in the ’fifties, but to me, as a boy, the whole town was
only a delightful playground and the people who lived there merely “home
folks.” To be sure, I invested some of the great ones with halos of
romance. This was not because I knew anything about their literary or
artistic attainments, but rather because of the lack of heroic
characters in the town. Had there been a Jesse James or a Charlie
Chaplin anywhere round, I should probably have woven my dreams of
adventure about them. But the jail was always singularly empty, and the
movies had not been invented. I was forced, therefore, to pin my
youthful imaginings upon a Hawthorne, an Emerson, or a Thoreau! I have
always felt I was greatly cheated.
I lived in the Old Manse, from which Hawthorne plucked his mosses. It
was built in 1760 by the Rev. William Emerson, the grandfather of Ralph
Waldo, and was a delightful house for a boy to grow up in. There was a
long hallway running from east to west, and from the stairway a line of
grisly divines, framed in black, looked down. They were mostly
ancestors, and they gave a terrible air of austerity to the interior;
but below and above were many redeeming features.
One was the swing shelf in the basement, always covered with fascinating
goodies. Here on Saturday night one might cut with one’s jackknife a
hunk of juicy meat roasted ready for Sunday’s dinner, and wash it down
with cream from the shining pan of milk next to it. Here were preserves,
jellies, cakes, and pies just cooling from the oven; while over in the
corner barrels of apples were stored away for winter consumption. I
shall never forget the delights of the swing shelf.
The Old Manse was built in the manner of the eighteenth century—entirely
of wood, the oaken timbers being held together with oaken plugs. We boys
found it quite easy to draw these from place, and we used them for
tholepins in our dory. Fortunately, the grown-ups got on to us or I
believe the house would have eventually collapsed.
There was a gabled roof with chimneys at both ends, and, of course, all
sorts of wonderful nooks and crannies to hide away in. It was up in this
attic that my grandmother Ripley was found by a caller rocking a cradle
with her foot and holding a book in her hand which she was intently
reading. It was written in Sanskrit! She apologized because she needed a
dictionary to read this language. This was not so of Latin and Greek, as
she read them fluently; but she used to say, “I cannot _think_ in
Sanskrit.”
She whom the name, “Peasant Princess,” fits better than any other, was
the wife of Emerson’s father’s half-brother, and therefore older than
Emerson. He used to spend a great deal of his time with her at the Old
Manse, and she had much to do with influencing his life. One can see
this from his letters as a boy.
[Illustration:
THE OLD MANSE AT CONCORD
At the window—Edward Simmons’s mother; Under the umbrella—his sister
Elizabeth; Standing—his first cousin, Sarah Alden (Thayer) Ames;
Seated—one of his cousins of the Bradford branch.
]
My grandmother’s sitting room was the delight of my life. There was a
broad chimney shelf, and low down on the left-hand side a framed bit of
handwriting, an invitation to Lieutenant Bradford to dine with General
Washington. Over that was a big hornet’s nest, a stuffed owl, and,
strangest of all, a copy of the “Beatrice Cenci” and Titian’s “Tribute
Money,” brought back from Italy by my father. I always thought, as a
child, that the head of Christ was a family portrait and that the Jew
with the tribute money was a tradesman. Why the tradesman was giving one
of us money instead of _vice versa_, I did not know.
Here in this room I used to dream until most likely interrupted by some
caller upon grandmother. Then I would retire to the corner and listen to
their conversation about antislavery, human freedom, states’ rights,
etc.—understanding not a word, but fascinated by the fervor of the
speakers. I have seen gathered together in this parlor Emerson, Frank
Sanborn, Charles Sumner, and John Brown, the last short and squat, his
great beard upon his breast, and spreading his coat tails before the
fire like a pouter pigeon.
Something that occurred years later, when I was a student at Harvard,
made me appreciate my grandmother more than ever. Prof. Asa Gray, a man
of seventy, and the first botanist of the world at that time, met me in
the Yard one day and stopping me said:
“I understand that your name is Simmons and that you are the grandson of
Mary Bradford Ripley?”
I replied that I was.
He took off his skull cap and bowed low to the ground, saying, “Allow me
to do honor to the offspring of one of the ablest botanists I have ever
known.”
I remember her looks well. Her features were very marked and her nose
big and straight. Her hair was then white and she had blue-gray eyes.
There is a photograph of her sitting under a grape arbor, looking very
absent-minded, with the little finger of her left hand hooked in the
corner of her mouth—a habit of my sister and both of my boys!
Grandfather’s salary as a Unitarian clergyman was the munificent sum of
six hundred dollars a year, and on this my grandmother managed to bring
up a large family of children—doing all the cooking and sewing
herself—marry off three of the girls, and send the two boys through
college. “As big as Sam Ripley” was the saying throughout the
countryside, and, although he was lusty and hail, my grandfather died
when he was in his prime—in fact, before I was born. The circumstances
of his death, which I heard when a youngster, made a deep impression
upon me.
It was the day before Thanksgiving. The Old Manse was full of guests and
relatives when he took his daughter Elizabeth and, filling his buggy
with goodies, drove out to distribute them to his poor parishioners. The
last gift delivered, they turned upon the road home, he remarking that
the Widow Hall would certainly enjoy the two chickens he had left her.
It was a rainy, bleak November night and Lizzie, snuggling into the
robes, almost went to sleep, when, looking down, she noticed the reins
were slipping. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. Even then she
could not realize what the matter was, until, reaching to gather in the
lines, she felt his hand cold beneath hers. He was already dead.
I often used to think of that drive—the tragedy of the young girl
guiding the horse over miles of muddy road in a blinding rain, and the
arrival at the brightly lighted house, full of laughter and merriment,
with the sad burden by her side. How did she tell them? Did she call
from the road, or did she leave him there and go into the house? How
_could_ one tell what to do under such circumstances? Perhaps the joyous
crowd ran out to meet her and there was a great hush—they never told me
that part. But I liked to believe that it was my grandmother Ripley,
who, all alone, was watching from the doorway, and knowing intuitively
that something was wrong, took the whole situation into her strong,
capable hands.
Like all boys, I was intensely interested in birds and animals. One day
I was playing in the grass in front of the Old Manse, when I suddenly
looked up to see a short man with a blond beard leaning over me.
“What have you there, Eddie?”
“A great crested flycatcher’s egg,” I replied.
This was a very rare find.
He wanted me to give it to him, but I would not. Then he proposed a
swap.
“If you will give it to me, I will show you a live fox,” he said. This
was too much to resist. We made a rendezvous for the next Sunday.
Although descended from a line of parsons, I had already learned that
Sunday was, for me, merely a holiday, and it was evidently the same for
him. This man was Henry D. Thoreau.
Accordingly, the following Sabbath I trudged down to his place at Walden
Pond, and he, who had “no walks to throw away on company,” proceeded to
devote his entire afternoon to a boy of ten. After going a long way
through the woods, we both got down on our bellies and crawled for
miles, it seemed to me, through sand and shrubbery. But Mr. Fox refused
to show himself—and worse luck than all, I never got my egg back! I have
always had a grudge against Thoreau for this.
Concord was a town utterly without crime. There was no gazing into the
jail windows to catch a glimpse of the hideous offenders against the
law. I never really heard of but one prisoner in my life, and he was so
mild that he hardly made an impression. During my time this man was the
only inhabitant of the jail and, technically, he did not belong there. A
number of years before he had been imprisoned for some offense, and,
after being released, returned and begged to be taken in again, as he
was lonely and had gotten used to the place. So, one could see him ’most
any summer evening sitting out on the steps of the jail. He was a great
pet of the Emerson family, and was hired to play the violin for all the
dances.
One of my memories of the Old Manse is that of the Thursday-afternoon
visits of Ellery Channing, the poet. I never saw anything written by him
until I left the town. He was always asked to supper and always stayed,
becoming thereby a part of the mental furniture of the place. He was
old, fattish, disorderly, absent-minded, and to me so unæsthetic, that I
_knew_ he could not be a good poet. I don’t believe he was. A humbler
than Thoreau, who practically occupied the same position in the
estimation of the Emersons. I remember with what was then for me horror,
but now extreme sympathy, that years before, his wife had left him
because she had insisted upon his having a carpet in his study. This he
kept patiently removing until, returning from a camping trip, he found
it firmly nailed to the floor; so he pulled it up, tore it in strips,
and hurled it out of the window, thereby ruining the carpet and both
their tempers.
Another frequent caller upon our family was Charles Sumner. I remember
him most vividly upon one occasion. He had come in for luncheon. Mother,
who left the intellectual part of the life to others and always said, “I
find philosophers have just as hearty an appetite as other
people—especially for pie,” was in the kitchen, making this delectable
dish. I was playing upon the sitting-room floor. Suddenly I felt a hand
upon my head.
“My boy,” he said, “when you grow up you’ll find out two things. One is
that all men have mothers, but I don’t think you will ever meet any
other man who has ever had a mother like yours.”
My father died when I was three years old and I had always taken mother
more or less for granted, and I thought him very silly at the time.
I once asked mother how she came to be married. My father, who had
almost been tarred and feathered in the South for his antislavery
sermons, had fled North and finally became the fashionable young
preacher of Boston. Mother was one of five sisters, and said she was
astounded when he asked her to marry him, as she always supposed it was
Lizzie he wanted—Lizzie being the intellectual one. It was that way with
mother. Brought up in an intellectual atmosphere where learning was
considered the only thing of account, she was always surprised when
anyone showed a preference for her—a woman who would rather scrub a
kitchen floor than write an essay!
Mother’s democratic tendencies spread in every direction. There was a
pew in church that was supposed to be reserved for the poor. “No one in
the poorhouse is any poorer than we are,” said mother, and marched us
into it every Sunday. The Old Manse pew was farther up the aisle, and,
besides, one had to pay for that.
Although she was such a housewife, she had a great independence of
thought. A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth
to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal.
The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered
behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his
mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No
one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every
summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill
to call.
To me Hawthorne always typified the haughty Southerner. I did not know
what haughty Southerners were like, but I had heard them talked about
and supposed they were very superior creatures—an idea my worthy
relatives would have promptly squelched had they known it. Hawthorne was
a hero to me, and whenever I read a romance, such as _Ivanhoe_ or the
“Iliad,” I pictured the conqueror as tall, broad, dark, and spare, with
a dark mustache. This was the way Hawthorne looked to me.
I would never have dared speak to him, and do not remember having seen
him at the house; but, of course, the Old Manse was filled with memories
of his presence.
I remember staring for hours at a time at the words he wrote on the
window of the dining room, and wondering how he did it. It read:
“On this day my daughter Una was born, while the trees are all glass
chandeliers.”
What a sentence for a boy to dream about! It is still there, and there
are many other windows with his name only.
I had never seen any diamond rings; none of my womenfolk wore rings, and
it seemed strange to me how anyone could write on a pane of glass!
Hawthorne, contrary to public opinion, did not own the Old Manse, but
only rented it from the Ripleys. In fact, he lived there only a year or
more. It was a great disillusion to find later that the grown-ups of my
family did not consider him a great hero, and in fact thought his
writing on the windows a horrible defacement of the house—especially as
they had had some difficulty in collecting the rent.
My most vivid memory of Hawthorne is during the time I was attending the
intermediate school. In front of the building was the town square,
separated from the school by an iron fence. Here we boys used to play
baseball, and upon going home, I, forgetful as always, would invariably
leave behind my dinner pail or my jacket. I was invariably sent back to
fetch it.
By this time the shadows had begun to fall, and very often I saw
Hawthorne and his wife pass by, arm in arm, she in white and he
dark—dark as the coming night. They spoke in low tones and seemed to be
oblivious of any passers-by. I was told that he went out only at night,
and this made him all the more romantic to me. The truth was that he was
very shy, and so, in the daytime, went only into the woods in back of
his house. He was a great lover of children, but so fearful of meeting
them that he concealed himself in a hollow tree in order to see the
festival that the school gave once a year.
Mr. Channing told me that once he was rowing with Hawthorne on the
Assabet River, the north branch of the Concord. He remarked that the
reflection of the hemlocks in the water was unusual.
“Which is the reflection?” said Hawthorne, pointing first to the
hemlocks and then to the picture in the water. This seems to me to be
very characteristic of Hawthorne’s method of thought.
Concord was an historical spot, and in the summer was overrun with
tourists, who, not content with viewing the scene of the “shot heard
round the world,” etc., would invade the Old Manse. These gangs were
allowed to go all over the house in which Hawthorne once lived, much to
the discomfort and derision of the occupants. One day, when I was still
quite a young man, there was a party of people upstairs nosing around,
and my uncle Gore (Judge Ripley) and I were in the sitting room. My
sister had brought in, not long before, a long, draggly bit of Spanish
moss and put it on the chimney shelf. While the tourists were upstairs,
my uncle rose and, taking the moss, went to the front door, where,
climbing upon a chair, he hung it. It trailed down three or four feet.
When the party came down and started to go out, the moss was evidently
in the way. Lifting it up so that the door would open without catching
it, my uncle bowed and with his best manner as chief justice of the
Minnesota Supreme Court, remarked:
“The moss—of which he wrote!”
[Illustration:
SARAH ALDEN (BRADFORD) RIPLEY
Grandmother of Edward Simmons
(_From a pencil drawing by Edward Simmons_)
]
Every jaw fell; their eyes rolled upward and in dead silence they
marched to their carryall.
A little old woman with mitts and poke bonnet appeared at the Emerson
house one day and begged for a piece of “your dear father’s clothing.”
“I am making a rag carpet of poets’ garments,” she said.
She was refused.
“Is that field yours?” she asked, pointing across the way. She was told
it was.
“Do you mind if I trespass? You see, I am also making a collection of
crickets from poets’ homes.”
I should like to have seen the crickets stuck up in a row on their pins,
but I fancy the rag carpet would have been more amusing. Imagine walking
on Mr. Longfellow’s red flannel shirt!
Every remembrance of my boyhood seems permeated with the Civil War. It
is hard for me to remember when it began or when it ended. We were
always having holidays at school, either for a victory or for a defeat.
The flag was constantly up or at half mast at the town pump, giving us
the idea of “goin’ fishin’ or somethin’.”
There comes before my mind a ghastly figure (bearded) in a box in the
church. A dead man! The first I had ever seen! He had been shot in the
South.
One day under the red dogwood bush in the Southeast corner of our place,
I found the cap and jacket of a conscript. After escaping, he had
evidently changed there. I pictured him “shot at dawn” if caught, so I
never told.
I have heard that the Old Manse was an underground station for slaves,
but I never saw any evidence of it myself. I remember that Frank Sanborn
stayed at our house for awhile when he escaped from the Southern people,
who tried to carry him away out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. If
there were negroes there, I should have known as much about it as I did
about childbirth—always being sent away on the latter occasions. In
fact, I had never seen but one negro in my life. He was an escaped
slave, very old, who took care of our garden, cow, etc. He limped badly
from rheumatism, and my uncle Charles had given him some liniment. One
day I heard my uncle ask:
“John, did you really try that liniment?”
“Oh, yes sah!” said John.
“Did it do you any good?”
John assured him that it did, but uncle Charles was not quite convinced
that he was telling the truth, so he persisted:
“Did it turn your knee black, John?”
“No blackah dan it was befo’, sah.”
Suddenly, I realized that John’s legs were the same color as his face!
It seemed to me that every day after school I was nailed by my
grandmother and a bunch of old women and made to sing war songs. I can
see them now, sitting round in a circle, pulling lint and crying (for
invariably some one they cared for had just died) and listening to me
bellow:
Say, darkies, hab you seen de massa wif de muschaf on his face
Go long de road sometime dis mornin’ like he gwine to leab de place?
He seen de smoke way up de ribber whar de Lincum gunboats lay
An’ he took his hat an’ lef’ very sudden, like he gwine t’ run away.
“Oh, de massa run, ha! ha! De darkies stay, ho! ho!
For it mus’ be now de Kingdom’s comin’;
It’s de year ob jubilo!”
I tried to enlist at the age of ten as a drummer boy. I was told I would
be taken when I had learned to beat a tattoo on a drum. Delighted, I ran
home to tell the news, only to find that the orderly had been sent up
the back street to tell my mother, and instead of being received as a
hero I was severely reprimanded. This only increased my disgust with the
war.
One of the most picturesque figures of Concord in those days was A.
Bronson Alcott. I knew him well as a friend of the family, but on
looking back I visualize him in two places. He was very long, slab sided
and lean, and what you would call pasty faced, with hair that fell to
his shoulders. I can see him sitting in his abominable rustic
chairs—with a disease that happens to trees making lumps all over them.
He made this furniture himself and used to be very proud of it, but I
used to run by like mad for fear of being asked to go in and sit on one
of those benches, which I felt might make lumps all over _me_.
The other picture is Mr. Alcott sitting beside our teacher, a woman, at
school. It was one of those first afternoons of spring when all outdoors
is calling to boyhood and you can think of a thousand interesting things
to do. But this strange creature took up a whole afternoon in reading
Bunyan to us! Needless to say, I have sidestepped Bunyan ever since.
They tell a story of Mr. Alcott being accosted, in his youth, by a
farmer in Bellows Falls, who asked:
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Alcott?”
“I write.”
“Hell! What?”
“Thoughts.”
“What for?”
“For posterity.”
Exit farmer.
I have always thought that if the good Bronson had lived in the
twentieth century he would almost certainly have belonged to that colony
which inhabits the district west of Washington Square.
Louisa looked very much like her father—pasty and lean, with a very
large nose. To me, as a child, she seemed a very unattractive and a most
unkissable person, probably because she was quite a masculine type. Her
sister May was very different. She was tall and good-looking, with lots
of beautiful blond hair. She painted, and later went to Paris to study.
It seemed to me she was always lying in a hammock, being rocked and read
to by my brother or Julian Hawthorne. Louisa may have been impressed
with this picture, as May is the Amy of _Little Women_, and these two
boys are supposed to be a composite hero. I have been told I was the
little boy who rolled downstairs in his nightgown, in the story of the
Pickwick Club entertainment, but do not remember the actual occurrence.
Louisa was evidently quite awkward, and in many ways not house broke;
also absent-minded and careless, as is the traditional author. It seems
that her manners at table were commented upon once too often by other
members of her family. She decided not to stand it. So one morning she
managed to be the first at breakfast, and when the remainder of the
family turned up in the dining room they were greeted with a strange
sight. Louisa had pinned the New York _Tribune_ around her head and was
wearing it like a great helmet. The pages reached the table and
completely covered her plate. Only her hands were visible. At intervals
they would come out, take something, and retire behind the paper again.
For weeks she kept this up and no amount of pleading would stop her,
until there was a general abject apology from the whole family.
None of the second generation appreciated the Concord atmosphere. Louisa
tells of her astonishment, when grown, to learn that no society was so
fine or intellectual as that of her childhood.
The saddest results of this strangely intellectual atmosphere was the
number of spinsters it produced. The Misses Blood were always a curious
sight to me. Their house, way up in the woods, was chair to chair and
bureau to bureau, completely around the rooms, with priceless old
Colonial furniture, but their economies were a revelation. Every Sunday
they would stop in front of the Old Manse at the foot of the avenue and,
retiring into a niche in the trees, put on their shoes and stockings,
which they had carried during the three-mile walk. They always stayed
for second service, and one of my amusements, when the sermon was dull,
was to watch them begin their lunch, which generally consisted of Bent’s
water crackers. In and out, in and out went the hard, round objects, in
their attempts to bite with their one or two remaining back teeth. The
sight almost hypnotized me.
Their death, which occurred after I was grown up, was one of the
unspoken tragedies of life. One day a farmer passed and noticed there
was no smoke coming from their chimney. He went in and found one of the
sisters dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs, having fallen down and
broken her leg. The other sister, who had become paralyzed and deaf, was
sitting in a chair upstairs, also dead. The one had not been able to
move after her fall, and the other could not hear her cries. Both had
died from starvation.
I was brought up as a young duke—without the estates!—and I was never
allowed to earn money. I recall being severely reprimanded by my mother
and made to walk back three miles to return a nickel a man had given me
for running an errand. I was told I should have been glad to do it for
nothing. I remember my surprise, years later, when I was in Europe, to
hear that Americans were “commercial.” The desire for great material
gain was either astonishingly developed in one generation, or did it, as
I suspect, creep in a little as the emigration from the Old World
increased? Certainly there was none of it in that truly American town of
Concord, Massachusetts.
[Illustration:
EDWARD SIMMONS
At the age of seven
]
In Concord it was no disgrace to be poor—nearly everyone was—and until I
was nearly grown I never had a new suit of clothes. My brother’s and my
breeches were made from the old army uniforms, the cloth having a
wearing quality that was almost like iron and would pull a nail out of
anything rather than tear. We were called “Blue Legs” until we were
quite grown up.
My cousins, the Emersons, represented affluence, in my childish mind.
Their house was a square wooden one, set among trees, mostly pines and
chestnuts. There was a solemn, gravelike quality to it. I remember going
down alone on errands, and always had a feeling of awe upon approaching
it. I think this was because the trees were so close to the house that
the grass would not grow and everything was damp around it. The door was
always open, and Mr. Emerson generally came into the hall when anyone
approached. This was a wonderful relief to me, as I was terrified by the
women and servants. The inside gave me the impression of wealth and
spaciousness. It may have been the reflection of the talk I heard at
home, but it seemed very impressive and august.
No amount of grown-up talk could make me fear Mr. Emerson, however, or
feel the slightest embarrassment in his presence. He seemed, like my
grandmother, to be a perfect example of serenity. He received me as an
equal and entertained me as if I were a young prince. He had reached
that extreme height of simplicity where he could be interesting to a
boy, and, while I preferred him to any of the others, I was quite sure
he did not count for as much.
Mr. Emerson’s study was to the right of the hall. There was a large
fireplace, and what were to me magnificent red-velvet chairs on either
side. There must have been hangings of the same material, as I got the
feeling of crimson everywhere. From the floor to the ceiling, the walls
were lined with books—books that had been read and reread until the
bindings were very much worn.
Of my early memories of Mr. Emerson, two are most vivid. The first in
his garden, where he often took me, walking slowly about and telling me
of each flower and plant as if it were a particular friend. I never read
his _Days_ that I do not visualize him in his “pleached garden,” showing
me his pear trees.
The second memory is of Thanksgiving time. Every year on this day there
was a gathering of the clan at the Emersons. There were the Thayers,
Jacksons, Emersons, Simmonses, Bradfords, and Ripleys, but no others.
The dinner was the traditional New England affair, the table heaped with
food; and the conversation consisted of the usual family gossip. I
remember there was always a discussion among the women as to whether one
said Mr. Emerson or Cousin Waldo.
As soon as dessert was served and the nuts and fruit brought on, there
was a little ceremony that was invariably performed. Mr. Emerson would
look down from the head of the table and, pretending not to see me, say:
“Where is that little boy who likes figs?”
This was my cue to march up to him, and, taking me on his knee, he would
pop into my mouth, one by one, these delightful and expensive fruits,
until I could not contain another one. Of course, my mother protested
all the time, but he paid not the slightest attention.
After dinner, in the evening, we played all sorts of games such as dumb
crambo, and then everyone had to perform. It was a pet theory of Mr.
Emerson’s that everyone should learn self-expression, and he demanded a
recitation from the children of four and five up to those of the
marriageable age. There was absolutely no way to get out of this.
Despite the protests of the women, Mr. Emerson would have his
after-dinner cigar. In fact, he almost always got his way, although he
was never dictatorial. Sometimes it was with a gentle remark. When his
wife asked him if she could have a spiritualistic meeting in the front
parlor, he answered her with Hotspur’s words:
“Certainly, for well I know thou willst not utter what thou dost not
know and so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!”
On another occasion, when Aunt Mary was visiting the family, he happened
to be in Boston. Aunt Mary slept in her coffin. She was very small, so
purchased it before her death to be sure she had the right size and
would not rattle! Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife in Concord, telling her
he was going to bring some notables home for a visit, and begged her to
persuade Aunt Mary not to wear her shroud at breakfast.
Emerson’s sense of honor and justice were two of his most important
qualities. The farmers used to come to him to settle their legal
quarrels. Whatever difference of religious opinion the community held,
they refused to allow him to be criticized in any way. When the Rev.
Grindell Reynolds—an excellent but limited divine—got up in the
Unitarian church and referred to the street upon which Emerson lived as
“Atheist Lane,” the congregation rose in a body and filed out.
Another instance of his very highly developed sense of justice is the
case of General Loring, who was supposed to be a traitor to the
antislavery movement. The lesser minds raved and swore they would never
speak to him again. Whittier wrote a poem about him. Emerson gave no
tongue, but one evening after a Lyceum lecture in Salem he saw the
general in line with those who wished to congratulate and shake hands
with him. Speaking very distinctly so that everyone about could hear, he
said, taking the proffered hand:
“General Loring, if what I hear of you be true—I shake hands with you
under protest.”
The last time I saw Mr. Emerson was in 1879. I was in my twenty-seventh
year, had just returned from California, and was spending some time in
Concord before going abroad. Charles H. Davis, the painter, was visiting
me at the Old Manse, and we both went over and supped with him. He
seemed much older, but was still that example of perfect serenity I had
known as a boy. His memory was beginning to fail him, which made him a
bit querulous, but his daughter Ellen supplied it whenever she could.
For example, he forgot that he had ever seen Tom Taylor’s tribute, or
apology, to Lincoln, in _Punch_—in spite of the fact that it is included
in the Parnassus—and read it to us, at my request, with astonishment and
delight. He read beautifully, and his voice retained all of its old
hypnotic quality.
While his memory failed in the detail of names and places, he still
retained, in most cases, his fascinating mode of expression, and the
process of thought was still there. He said the night Davis and I were
there—
“Last week, it was the day ... the day that ... who was it was here?
Ellen, can you remember? Oh! It was our religious friend.” He referred
to Whittier.
He asked, upon going out for a walk, “Where is that thing everybody
borrows and no one ever returns.” He meant an umbrella and had forgotten
the name.
This story was told me by my mother. They knew (the women) that
Emerson’s opinion of Longfellow was the same as theirs—the Bromides—and
that the two men, of course, loved and admired each other—which they did
not. Of course, Mr. Emerson must go to the funeral of the poet.
Accordingly, the poor man was pulled up, himself more dead than alive,
and brought down to Cambridge. He sat at the church, seemingly
unconscious of the _raison d’être_ of it all. Then he rose (holding on
to his coat tails was not effective) and joined the procession about the
body.
On crossing the Cambridge Common later, he suddenly stopped, faced
around toward the church, and then looking at them, said:
“I do not remember the name of our friend we have just buried, but he
had a beautiful soul.”
In some people the loss of memory can be a blessed thing.
I cannot write a biography, and my opinion is of no value, but Emerson
was one of the supermen I have met. He seemed to glorify everything with
which he came into contact. Like all great men, he was surrounded with a
lot of worshipers, most of them inferiors, and, as Henry James says,
these Concord figures were not so interesting in themselves as that
Emerson thought them so. He was the kind of man who “rendered the
commonplace sacred.”
He was always a teacher or a preacher, whether he remained in the Church
or not. He spoke of Shakespeare as “our man” and Homer as the “old man,”
showing that by training his mind he stood with one mental foot on Homer
and the other, with us, on Shakespeare. He could have been a great
lyricist, but, as Henry Adams remarks, there is no rhythm in New
England; the climate will not permit it. Emerson was ashamed of his love
of beauty, rhythm, and lyricism, as being not quite true to New England.
Like Renan, he blossomed the more fully when surrounded by beautiful
women. He married two. To me he seems a very shrewd Yankee. Look at the
depth of his thought in “Lovers, preserve your strangeness.”
It was because he talked to a great number of his own ilk that he
penetrated America’s thought so easily. I agree with Matthew Arnold that
Emerson was the first essayist of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration:
MARY EMERSON (RIPLEY) SIMMONS
]
The Concord literati are gone, the town has completely changed, but the
Old Manse is still there, holding many secrets. Not the least
interesting of these was uncovered in about ’81, when the house was torn
up to put a bow window in the corner of the southeast parlor. The wall
paper, undoubtedly hideous in color when placed there, had mellowed to a
lovely Whistlerian tone. This, of course, had to be removed. To the
astonishment of everyone, it was discovered that the pattern had been
printed upon the back of French newspapers of the period of the
Revolution. (This economy in paper will be understood by our experience
in the last war.) There were editions with the speeches of Mirabeau and
many other of the patriots of the time. Think of Frank Sanborn, my uncle
George Bradford, and Mr. Emerson, to say nothing of my grandmother
Ripley and John Brown, gathered about the fireplace in this room,
discussing the problems of the Civil War, while from the walls cried out
to them Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton:
“_CON-CITOYENS!—CON-CITOYENS!_”