The slow but steady progress in America toward a sense of beauty is due
more to the architects than to any one class of people. The definition
that an “architect is a business man with a slight artistic leaning,” is
not such a bad one, and the combination of the two qualities has proved
most happy in many cases. I think we must grant some of them more than a
_leaning_ toward the arts, though, and give them credit for a certain
“taste” developed in our country during the last part of the last
century. I have heard a prominent architect declare the Woolworth
Building, built by Cass Gilbert, to be the most beautiful example of the
Gothic ever done in America, and yet it is also a good business
building. This shows that any type of architecture can be made
practical. As to the interiors, we might still be in the Victorian Age,
if it had not been for these men showing us how ugly it was.
As soon as I returned from Europe, I was put up at The Players, and
after my two weeks’ card, given me by Alexander Harrison, expired, I was
proposed for membership and duly elected. My sponsor, besides Harrison,
was Stanford White, and during my time as a guest of the club, I got to
know this very simple person (who was a child and an artist and never
became an adult) as well as I did in later years. The three men of the
architectural firm of McKim, Meade, and White fitted together perfectly.
I once asked Meade what he was doing in that gallery, and he said that
he was the water which makes the chemical reaction of acid and alkali
lose its power for harm—he kept the other two from being crazy artists.
Stanny always looked to me like Vercingetorix. I used to say that his
proper clothing was a wolfskin and a battle-ax, and that he should let
his hair grow long. This hair, which was bright red, was accompanied by
the usual white skin of that type of person, so that in swimming he
looked (he was very tall) like a great white tallow candle. He was as
strong as a prize fighter, but, like most men of that character, he
never used his physical power. Unlike most big men, he was always in a
hurry, dashing about here and there and with his body always slightly
bent forward—he took very short steps—trotting along the sidewalk like a
busy little girl.
Red hair, of course, means a violent and ultra-passionate disposition,
but Stanny _never_ lost his temper. A delicate sensitiveness combined
with a tenderness that would not be understood by the ordinary human
being. I have seen him turn the color of castile soap if he had to do
with any deformity or suffering. We had a mutual friend, a lovely boy, a
humpback, who died never knowing that he caused horror to Stanford
White. To shake that thin wasted hand would cause him to turn away his
face with a green, seasick expression, but he would do anything rather
than hurt the boy’s feelings.
One day I went out of the club with Stanny—or rather, I rushed out—he
did not _go_ out of anything, but ran and slammed the doors—when we came
across a professional beggar who was well known to both of us as always
being just a “quarter” shy of the fare he needed to get to New Rochelle.
He had probably been on his way to New Rochelle for the last twenty
years. Stanny, as was his custom, grabbed a handful of silver from his
pocket and thrust it into the astonished beggar’s hand in an embarrassed
way. I said:
“I suppose you know that you are not really doing him any good. They say
he is rich.”
“Oh,” he answered, “you don’t understand. Do you suppose I was trying to
do him good? I was only trying to justify my own existence.”
Of the most impetuous, impulsive, lovable nature, with him to think was
to act. I once tried to chaff him about the way his child was being
brought up. My boys, about the age of his, were always out in Gramercy
Park. They had said:
“We are always together unless it rains, but if Larry White gets his
feet wet, the nurse makes an awful fuss and takes him home. And she
never lets him go on the grass.”
I told his father. There was a roar and a bang, and Stanford was gone
out of the door. In a few minutes he was back, saying:
“He’ll play with your boys to-morrow.”
“What did you do, scold the nurse?” I asked.
“No; I fired her.”
Stanford White was a real artist, one of the kind that could no more
help doing beautiful things than he could help living. Practically a boy
when he did it, I saw a frame in his home that he had carved for Mrs.
White during their engagement. It was a most delicate and complicated
pattern—I have the impression that it was of flowers and figures—but it
gave the effect of one of those Chinese openwork ivory carvings, and
formed the most exquisite setting for a small portrait by Thomas Dewing,
something that Meissonier could never have done, as he had not Dewing’s
sense of beauty.
I believe that Stanford set the fashion here of building to our
latitude. We had formerly copied the British in our homes, using red
brick or brownstone, with small windows, reps curtains, and nailed-down
carpets of warm dark brown and scarlet—the stuff of the north for New
York City, which is the latitude of Madrid. The change was to blond
brick, marble, or Missouri limestone for the outside; and stone or
polished floors, Turkish rugs or mats for the inside, with a decided
lightening of the color scheme, so much so that a great “gag” was to
call the firm “McKim, White, and Gold.” To show that most of their
tendencies were for light interiors, a remark of Stanford’s can be
quoted. He told a woman, for whom he had just finished an ivory-colored
room, when she asked him what to put on the walls, “Oh, any color as
long as it is red.” Any painter knows that, given white as a background,
the only color one can trust the average citizen with is red. It takes
an artist to put blue and white or green and white together; and some
one with a Whistlerian feeling to put black and white together; but a
child can use red and white.
Nothing could be more different in style than the buildings Stanford
designed—the Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Club, Doctor
Parkhurst’s Church (which has now been torn down), or any of his
business buildings, are each made for the things they were to house. His
personal tastes were absolutely under the control of his artistic
feelings, and his sensitiveness was so great that he could lose his own
personality. When he fitted up his own house in Gramercy Park, the music
room was not his, it belonged to his family and their friends, and he
made it more beautifully classic than anything I have seen in North
America. A flight or two up was his own room. Vercingetorix in his cave
with all his spoils piled up around him! Everything he cared about (and
he wanted it at once) and a heterogeneous mass of priceless books,
paintings, draperies, all in a careless disorder, was happiness to him
in his own den.
I was in The Players when Stanny returned from his trip to Virginia,
having been asked to restore the principal building of the university,
which had been designed and built by Thomas Jefferson. As we sat
together over something to drink he seemed to be puzzled, confused, and
silent. I asked him what was the matter. He started and came out of his
mood, saying it was the job down South. “I’ve seen _his_ plans,” he
said, speaking with great deference. “They’re wonderful and I am scared
to death. I only hope I can do it right.” This left me with a conception
of the greatness of Jefferson in another rôle of which I was
ignorant—his architectural side. He is constantly impressing me as our
first American—an artist and, like all the big ones, a true democrat. He
represented the ideas of to-day and was farsighted enough to know they
were coming.
I saw the Metropolitan Club built; in fact, I painted the library
ceiling. I remember, in looking it over one day, I threw a lighted match
among some shavings and, in a panic, ran to stamp it out. I was told I
need not be afraid, as everything was fireproof. Stanny had bet a large
amount with Ogden Goelet that he would have the club finished on the
specified date. Just at the last moment the workmen struck. The
mantelpieces, of which there were a large number, had not been polished
in the state of New York and the unions demanded that they be done over
again. There was no time the night before the limit expired, but I knew
Stanny had a plan, so I went up to see the fun.
Stanny and the contractor had a line of boats filled with the necessary
materials waiting at the North River, and another line of carts and
workmen to bring them up. A thousand men and women were waiting in the
street—masons, handy men, scrub women, and what not. At six o’clock
sharp every trades-union workman had left; then in came the army. The
first ones, bearing huge rolls of paper, unrolled them on the floor from
the door to every fireplace. Women with mops stood at attention, to
clean up if anything dropped. Out on the street, the carts came up to
the door, one by one, each in solemn rotation, depositing its contents
of the grates, cement, bricks, or some material necessary to the
completion. These were whisked up by the workmen and borne in to their
rightful places. A continuous procession upstairs and downstairs which
reminded one of an army of ants building themselves a new home. All this
time the women with mops were waiting, lest a bit of something drop on
the new polished floors or splash against the walls. So carefully was
the whole affair planned, however, that not a thing was marred, and at 9
A.M. the next morning Stanford White handed over to the committee a
finished building. He won his money from Mr. Goelet, but with his
customary generosity bought a beautiful piece of tapestry and presented
it to the club.
Stanford was accused of shamefully copying when he built the Madison
Square Garden. It was supposed to be an exact replica of the Giralda, in
Spain. I have never seen the Giralda, but I have seen on the right and
left of a page, in juxtaposition, a photograph of both buildings. I do
not see a resemblance striking enough to comment upon. When one thinks
of how Shakespeare and Dumas, and, in fact, almost every great man, has
borrowed, the question for the fair minded is whether the thing borrowed
has been changed by the personality of the borrower, which, if he be of
any value, must overlay and extinguish that first personality and give
an entirely new impression. Remember the lines, “He winked at Omar down
the road....”
Mrs. Van Rensselaer wrote a long article somewhere about the Madison
Square building and gushed about that rare quality in the architects who
would go so far as even to vary the color of their bricks in
constructing the tower, so as to give it variance of tonality. This
seemed to me improbable, and one day I asked Meade about it. He said it
was “rot,” that if one of the brickmakers had not gone bankrupt, the
tower would have been the same color all the way up. I commented upon
the hideous color of the combination of brickwork and terra cotta
produced both in this building and in the Herald Building at
Thirty-fifth Street. Stanny told me not to be silly, but to wait until
they were twenty years old. Remembering it the other day, I looked, and,
behold! the tonality and color in the Madison Square building had come
together like smoothing velvet.
The first attempt at the statue on the top failed by reason of the fact
that the drapery which flew from the shoulder, and served as a tail or
rudder, did not accomplish its purpose of turning her arrow into the eye
of the wind. Saint-Gaudens (the sculptor) and Stanny spent some
thousands of dollars in taking it down and making a new one. The second
worked as a weathercock, but, alas! it was not half so beautiful. To-day
the drapery over which they spent so much time and money is gone. So
much does America care for its art and its artists!
One should not judge Stanford White’s ability as an architect by the
Washington Arch which stands at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The temporary
arch which preceded this one was put up in lath and plaster—staff—to
celebrate a memorial occasion, and was rarely beautiful in structure and
proportion. The city fathers asked him to reproduce it for permanence in
marble. He told them it could not be done, but after much argument he
gave in. I suppose it was a question of bearing power or stress, but he
did not succeed. Very few men have ever been able to alter—to their own
satisfaction, or to that of the public—their first inspiration. A “dub”
can; an artist can’t. The Washington Arch stands to-day, as many other
buildings in America do, a monument to the interference with an artist’s
dream.
Trinity Church in Boston is another example of the same thing.
Richardson’s original idea might have been a masterpiece, but, long
after it was wise to change his plans, the city authorities decided,
either from economy or from some other good reason, that, as the
building was situated on made land, it would not stand the weight of the
tower. They made him cut out fifty feet in height. You might as well cut
out two inches from a woman’s neck. Also, it is not fair to criticize
our own Grant’s Tomb. The architect’s plans were, I am told, that one
should see a building of stone capped by a great mass of bronze figures
on the top and one group on each of the four corners. The best modiste
in Paris might plan a hat with four large bunches of blue flowers. It is
not fair to call the hat her creation if you remove the bunches. Those
in power, again probably from economy, considered the tomb of the
President good enough as it was and did not add the bronzes.
Now in the days of the great men in art such things were generally in
the hands of a dictator—pope, king, or Mæcenas—and the people had
nothing to do with them—except like them. Whistler says that the
warriors, on returning from battle, did not care pro or con whether the
artist-man, who stayed at home, had carved their goblets or not, as long
as they were just as good to drink out of. I suppose one worships in the
Trinity Church just as well, but I do not believe that Grant receives
the honor that the building as it was planned would have given him, in
the mind of either laborer or lord.
This time was quite a social period in my life. Good plays, good music
and much of it—there was a spontaneity in the New York folk that has
never touched me at any other time in America. I was strong, though
never muscular, with the vitality of five men; and to work all day, run
to the club in the late afternoon, dine well, and then be in the company
of congenial friends most of the night, did not put a dent in my surplus
energy. Stanny was the great driving force of all our entertainments,
and as he was the type of man who always paid for everything and shoved
anyone aside who tried to get in first, my lack of money did not make
much difference. It was in 1893, I think, that he made me a member of
the Vaudeville Club. In those days, that large space to the left, in the
second tier of the Metropolitan Opera House, was given up to men only,
and behind was the bar, a set of rooms, and a small stage. Here a member
could meet a friend, have a drink, go in and hear what he wished of the
opera, and come out when he felt bored. After the performance there
would be a supper and a show given by the leading vaudeville people from
Broadway. Relaxation after the music, good food and drink, and much talk
and fun. Such entertainers as Vesta Victoria would be on the program,
and once we were honored by the presence of Mr. Sandow. The latter was
quite a lion for a time. I remember him, in evening clothes, coming into
the box of a lady very highly placed socially. He seemed to be paralyzed
by the attention given him. When he said good-by, and evidently wishing
to return his social obligations, he handed each feminine occupant of
the box a ticket to his private performances out at his quarters, where
they “could see more of him.”
I remember one dinner party which was much criticized, but in reality
how very moral and dignified it was! The guests, all men, were socially
and artistically of the best set of the town. We wanted a “blowout” and
we did not propose to be limited by New-Englandism, politics, or
anything else. There were fifty men; everything was in perfect taste,
arranged by the best artists in America. There was remarkably good
music, made by a colored orchestra, and—_mirabile dictu!_—no talk, no
speeches, and no toasts. Every man at that dinner knew that his
next-door neighbor would be a treat to talk to and a man on his feet
would be an interruption. Two girls—models—in exquisite costumes, one
blond and one brunette, poured the drinks, each one serving the colored
wine which corresponded to her complexion. At the dessert, solemn
servants came forward, bearing a huge six-foot pasty which was placed in
the center of the great horseshoe table. The negro musicians began to
sing, in that inimitable manner and rhythm of their race.
“Sing a song of Sixpence, pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie—”
At the next words,
“When the pie was opened—”
one of the artists leaned forward and skillfully broke the crust, and
myriads of canary birds (blackbirds not being obtainable even by Monte
Cristo) outpoured and flew to every corner of the room, just as a
charming young figure of a girl, draped from head to foot in black
illusion, with a stuffed blackbird upon her head, arose from the dish.
It was so new, original, and pretty, that comment upon it is absurd. The
society of these men was so good, so envied, and so far above the
average “low-brow” that it was preyed upon (probably more than other
class at any other time in the social history of America) by the jealous
and the criminal, and blackmailed to an extraordinary degree. It just
naturally broke itself up; Beauty is sensitive and would rather
disappear than run the risk of unwelcome publicity.
Referring to the character of Stanford White, his right hand never knew
what his left was doing. I think he more nearly fitted Emerson’s
definition of the word “gentleman” than anyone else I have ever known.
It runs something like this: “A gentleman is one who never brings his
mental or physical troubles from his bedroom; if he cannot leave them
behind, he stays with them.” If the word can be divided into its two
constituents—“gentle” and “man”—Stanny was certainly both, and I think
“gentleness” (the opposite of “weakness”) is possibly one of the words
which implies that we are now some distance from our ancestors, the cave
dwellers. He may have had troubles of his own, but we never knew about
them, for he was always so busy doing something for some one else that
he hadn’t time to talk of himself.
He pulled me out of many a financial hole, doubtless sometimes with much
work for himself. It is not always easy, even for rich men, to get sums
of money on the spur of the moment. Once he lent me three thousand
dollars on an order I was carrying out, and when I paid him, he returned
me the interest money the next day, with the words: “I give you this on
one condition, that you use it to go over to Europe and visit your
family. You need a vacation.” Dear old Stanny, it wasn’t the money help
that he gave his friends that made him so charming, but it was the
little things that require so much delicate thought. I do not think he
spent ten minutes a week thinking about himself.
One memorable Easter Sunday (the Ten were to open a show next day, and
we were hanging our work) Stanny appeared. I had two marines which he
liked, but he was greatly taken with a portrait of my grandmother which
was not yet framed and was leaning against the wall in the corner. I had
intended to get some inch-and-a-half molding for it. He could never bear
to have a work of art improperly dressed. I can see now how he looked,
beautifully groomed with top hat, frock coat—evidently on his way to
some smart affair. He looked at me a moment, then grabbed the portrait
and rushed from the place. Needless to say I followed. Outside was a
fine equipage, his own, and, taking it, we ended at his office, where he
had a floor stored with all kinds of valuable antiques, draperies,
frames, statues, which he had chosen in Europe—not because they were old
or only one of a kind in existence, but because they were beautiful—and
brought over here. Keeping up his two characteristic gestures of
scratching his head and rumpling his hair with one hand, and slapping
his thigh with the other—his office force knew that if he ever did the
two together it was time to flee—he dove into dozens of frames which
were piled for at least fifteen feet away from the wall. Ignoring his
clothes, he dashed in and was covered with dust in two seconds. In five
minutes he had tried all the frames and found two that fitted the
portrait. Telling me to take my choice, he turned around and was gone. I
had barely made my selection and turned to go when a flunky from his
Gramercy Park home ran in, out of breath, and grabbed the picture. When
we got to the street there was no sign of Stanny or his carriage, but a
large hired vehicle was waiting, ready to take me back to the gallery.
He was doing that sort of thing all the time, but would have been very
cross if anyone had mentioned it in public.
May I tell of a small matter which, until the death of both men, I have
kept to myself? Once Stanny came to me acting rather strangely, and
asked me if I would take a trip uptown with him. When we alighted at a
studio building where many of my friends lived he asked me to show him
the way to X’s rooms—an artist I remembered leaving behind us at the
club. It seemed strange that Stanny intended calling upon a man he knew
not to be at home, but I kept still. Kneeling down on the floor, he
shoved under the door a roll of bills which looked big figured to me,
and we fled. In the cab outside, I inquired what it meant.
“You know he needs it. I have it. Why shouldn’t I give it to him? But
you must never tell.”
I asked how much it was.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
The next day I heard X telling a friend that he had gone home the night
before, ready to pack his things, as he was to be kicked out of his
studio in the morning, but a most miraculous thing had happened. He had
found a roll of bills under his door.
I never told, and he died without knowing who had helped him.
One could hardly tell about the work of Stanford White without including
something of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, for America is richer by many works
of art which are the combination of the genius of these two men.
Saint-Gaudens was the son of a cobbler. I believe that if an exhaustive
history of the clever people of the world were written, it would be
found that a large percentage had been sons of cobblers. As a boy, I
used to be fascinated by a certain cobbler of the town, and while
listening to his words of wisdom I learned to make, entirely with my own
hands, a pair of boots. He was a socialist and, I suppose, an anarchist,
but the joy of life was in his heart and I am sure that fashioning a
beautiful covering for the human foot is as near making a statue as
anything could be.
It was funny to watch the French or the Irish crop out in Gussy. The
French was always on the alert for something beautiful. I remember being
taken by him and several architects up to a place in Cornish. They had
found a charming view. After climbing away up to the top of a
hill—mulleins, granite stones, and not much else in the foreground—I was
told to look off over the landscape and rave. They called it “Too Good
to be True.” I can visualize a farmer, an old resident of the place
(call him Haskins), coming in with the wood which he throws into the
woodbox, saying to his wife:
“There, Mother, I bet you can’t guess where that wood come from.”
“No. Where did it, Jake?”
“From that piece o’ land yer uncle Ezra left yer that Mr. Saint-Gawdeens
and them dudes calls ‘Too Good to be True.’” Great laugh from both.
But every year or two with Gussy the Irish would get on top. A day would
arrive when the work he was doing would disgust him too much. Then he
would fire his assistants, helpers, and everyone out and smash
everything in the studio. He would spend two or three days loafing in
the club and with his friends, then back again, clean it all up, and
begin work, saying, “Now we can get ahead.” The year that he was
forty-nine he came to me, feeling very blue.
“Simmy, I’m out of it. I caught the model we had to-day in class winking
at the fellows when I exclaimed a little too enthusiastically about her
charms. The same thing happened to my master in Italy when I was a
student, and I remember wondering how he could be so silly at his age.”
Then he told me how he had always jumped upon the platforms of the cars
while they were in motion. That day, as he did this, the driver said,
“Peart for yer age, ain’t yer?” In the future he intended to wait until
the car stopped and get on properly.
When he got these blue streaks he had the habit of coming down to The
Players, finding me, and saying: “Now, Simmy, you must help me. Order
anything you want, on me, but stay right here and talk to me.” I suppose
the sound of my voice was, for him, like Vergil’s bees in the lime
trees—a susurrus. The talk was anything and everything. Sometimes a
discussion about a college education—as to whether Lincoln would have
been the same if he had had one, etc., etc. I told him once about my
discovery that every man, secretly and in his own soul, thought himself
the ideal type of human being. An art class in Boston had been given as
a subject for Saturday afternoon an ideal head of a young Greek. The
results were placed on easels, and I easily picked out the author of
each drawing from its resemblance to himself. Then Gussie remembered
that in Italy there was a humpback in the class with him who made
everything deformed.
In Chicago, where I went at one time to consult Daniel Burnham, I met
Saint-Gaudens and McKim. To my astonishment, they had come to collect
money to start an academy at Rome. They raised about one hundred
thousand dollars, I believe, and this was the beginning. I always have
been and still am opposed to formal organizations, and an academy seemed
to me just another of the same kind. I couldn’t see Gussie in this
position and asked:
“_Que fais tu donc dans cette galère?_”
His reply was very logical.
“No, I don’t, but when I was a boy I wanted to learn sculpture. If there
had been an academy in Rome at that time, I could have gotten studio,
materials, models, and all that I wanted for nothing. Let Chicago and
everybody subscribe. Who are they, anyway? After one hundred years, the
money will have been well spent if only one artist—say a Michael
Angelo—is helped to get what he needs.” He was willing to sacrifice the
whole pig-killing town if one genius could be helped.
All the oil wells of Texas would not be worth, to our descendants, one
poem like the “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”
If I had the task of taking to Europe one thing as the best work of art
of America, I should take the tomb from the Rock Creek Cemetery in
Washington, which was created by those three artists—Saint-Gaudens,
Stanford White, and Henry Adams. Nothing we have made in this country as
yet, whether paint, carving, or architecture, can equal it. This figure,
an expression of the idea of death, marks, I am told, the last resting
place of the wife of Henry Adams, but there is no name and no
commemoration to any individual, no signature of artist or architect; it
is universal and might belong to any one of us. A pilgrimage to this
monument of a man’s respect for the woman he loved is, of necessity, a
sacred rite. One cannot pass gayly by in a motor car and give a careless
nod of approbation, but one must alight (let us hope from one of those
old-fashioned rickety open barouches, driven by the last of the negro
coachmen) and proceed up the narrowest, most delightful little path,
overgrown with shrubs and bushes, where at the top of a knoll and
carefully concealed from common gaze is the Sphinx. Like the pilgrims to
the ancient shrines, one wishes one had courage to go back and approach
this beauty of all time and no time, upon one’s bended knees. And her
surroundings! How wonderfully the loving architect has framed her; no
word and no talk about death. There she sits and speaks to everyone, and
the message is the secret of his innermost thoughts—so much as he
brings, so much does she tell, and no more.
One day in Paris the _Figaro_ started a reporter out to get the opinions
of different intellectual men upon death. Some gave a column, some a
half column, but when it came to Alphonse Daudet, he said:
“My idea of death?—_la mort?_—_psutt!_—”
There is nothing to say, and all I can think of when looking at the Rock
Creek Memorial, are the words of Shakespeare,
The Rest is Silence