It was during this period of my life that I did my best work; I had a
good studio in Carnegie Hall, freedom from money worries, and abounding
spirit. Also, my imagination was still fresh from the influence of
Europe, and the Old World was enough in retrospect for me to realize its
worth. One of the most interesting orders I received at this time was to
decorate a room in the new part of the Waldorf Hotel, that addition
called the Astoria. It was a long, narrow hall, the Astor Gallery, with
boxes all around a dais at one end. The room was an attempt at the
French of Louis Seize—bastard architecture, I think—fancy work and
rococo with curves and bends everywhere. After my work was all finished
I had to get up and paint over again the ribbon held by one of the
Cupids. It was taut and I changed it to wavy, as it proved to be the
only straight line in the whole room.
After I had submitted my sketches and they were accepted by the
architect, I had to go and sign my contract at the offices of John
Downey & Son. There was a large room full of stenographers and
bookkeepers, with a glass place on one side for the boss. John Downey
came out to greet me. As we sat at a big table, he pushed toward me a
long document, saying:
“There’s your contract. If you’ll read it over and it is satisfactory,
you’ve only to sign it and get your first payment.”
I read it and reached for the pen to sign. He must have seen some doubt
upon my face.
“Is it satisfactory,” he asked.
“No, but I’ll sign.”
“Why, I drew that contract myself! What’s the matter with it?”
“There is not enough time,” I replied.
His eyes narrowed.
“Mr. Simmons, you have lived a long time across the water? Yes? Let me
tell you something about American business methods. Never complain over
here that you haven’t enough time. If the job suits you, wade in and do
it. If you can’t finish it yourself, put on more men and work nights!”
“But there are things that can’t be done that way,” I insisted.
“Sir, I’ve been a contractor for twenty years in New York City and if
there is anything you cannot do that way, I should like to hear about
it.”
“Well,” I said, “I admit your business position, but I still believe
that if you wanted a son and heir you would have to respect the old rule
to wait nine months, and not put on more men and work nights.”
Sensation among the blond typewriters!
The working of a business man’s mind can never be guessed at beforehand.
I painted two decorations for one of America’s foremost financiers. In
making the sketches I was mindful of the fact that he was a pillar of an
orthodox denomination of the strictest type, and, while I suggested a
group of dancing figures, I was very careful to drape them sedately with
several layers of chiffon. What was my surprise when the criticism came:
“Mr. Simmons’s idea is very delightful, but the figures are not nude
enough!”
The late Andrew Carnegie was a good old-fashioned type of man who
thought the God-given power to amass a large fortune was indication of
an all-embracing good judgment and taste. I never met him but once. It
was in ’91, at a show of pictures of the Society of American Artists. I
was presented to this short, stout little man. “Mr. Carnegie” meant
nothing to me, as I had just come straight from England, and his fame
had not managed to penetrate the shores of Cornwall. He was most
indifferent, did not like the exhibition very much, and announced that
he has purchased the only good picture, pointing to an unimportant
landscape. Abbot Thayer’s “Madonna” (which Clarence King said should
have buckets under it to catch the dripping sentiment), a charming
Thomas Dewing, a beautiful thing by Theodore Robinson, and others were
all about him, so I ventured to tell the doughty Scotsman that he must
be deeply ignorant on the subject of art. That naturally closed the
interview.
For the Astor Gallery I chose as subjects women—which I like best to
paint—representing the twelve months of the year and the four seasons,
sixteen panels in all. How I labored over the color of the room,
changing the tone every three feet all the way up, until it looked all
the same! My idea was to make a background that would seem to be white,
but against which a woman’s complexion would be beautiful and a man’s
shirt front would tell. They have painted the whole thing over now, of
course. My decorations are untouched, but it is no longer my room.
[Illustration:
“JANUARY”
Panel by Edward Simmons, Astor Gallery, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New
York
_Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print, Copyright by Curtis
& Cameron, Publishers, Boston_
]
People do not realize what these little things mean. The architects had
given me the whole control, but even at the time I was doing the work I
was greatly restricted. There were four little panels that were not in
the contract, but sadly needed to be decorated. I offered to do them at
my own expense and also to change the terrible red-velvet railing that
ran around the balcony, but do you think the hotel authorities would let
me do it? No; the opening was on a certain day and all the workmen
_must_ be out before then. Business before art every time.
I had to insure the panels twice—once to the contractor and again to
John Jacob Astor, whose lawyer, by the way, demanded that all the
artists working in the building hand over their copyrights to him, which
they “had improperly taken out on Mr. Astor’s property.” We had a
meeting, and the others decided not to do anything to antagonize him. I
was furious and asked my friend, Luther Lincoln, what to do about it.
“Oh, come away and take a walking trip with me to the Delaware Water
Gap,” he said. I went and I still have my copyright. To show that my
rights in the matter are recognized by the authorities, the architect
once wrote to me and, saying that Mr. Boldt had asked for permission to
reproduce my panels in the _Hotel Guide_, and commanded me to grant the
same. I answered and gave him permission to _buy_ the photographs of my
work from Curtis and Cameron, relinquishing my royalties. Mr. Astor,
therefore, paid for the reproductions, so establishing my case.
This question of copyright is one that crops up all the time and never
will be really settled until some artist has money enough to carry a
case to the Supreme Court of the United States. Anyone who writes a
book, a play, or music, and even those who make etchings and engravings,
are protected, but the law does not apply to the painter or the
sculptor. I do not believe that the Supreme Court would decide in our
favor, for over here we are more apt to follow the English law, where
the buyer, unless otherwise stated, retains the copyright, and not the
French law, where the artist always has it.
After the decorators had been chosen for the work in the Appellate
Court, the chief justice asked me to bring in some of my former
contracts that he might see the form and make one for us to sign more or
less like them. Then, later, he asked me to make one which I thought
would serve. As the question was then vitally at issue about the
copyright, I slipped in a small clause—“artist to retain the copyright.”
It came back to me blue-penciled, so I saw it would be no use. Later,
the chief justice gave a talk at a lunch to which I was invited, and
remarked that Mr. Simmons was “not only an able painter, but a keen
lawyer.” If it had not been for an accident, he would not have noticed a
certain line that I had put into my contract, and I would have obtained
a decision of the Appellate Court for nothing. That line would have
established a precedent for the state of New York, and from that time
all artists would have had and owned their copyrights.
James Lord was the architect of the Appellate Court. There was great
trouble because he signed out the triptych to three men when it should
have been given to one. He evidently wanted to give everyone a chance,
for in the other part of the building he gave one frieze to five men.
Our triptych was done by Blashfield, Walker, and myself. We were to do
Justice in three forms, and as the work of Blashfield and myself was
more nearly alike, we put Walker in the middle. I waited until
Blashfield had determined the composition, the color scheme, and even
until he had actually painted his background, and then, as far as I
could, I followed him. After the canvases were completed and on the
wall, I found that my two figures of small boys in the foreground were
not in the right place, so I painted them out and moved them up four
inches higher. Blashfield went even farther. He took out a woman’s
figure with her back turned and changed her completely, because he did
not think she agreed with the general composition of the three. These
changes were very difficult, as they were done under a different light,
in a different place from the original work, and, of necessity (as the
building was then in use), without the assistance of models.
A remark of Richard Canfield’s on my panel is worth quoting. I have, in
the foreground, a symbolism of a child pushing away the nose of a
vulpine animal with his right hand, to protect a rabbit at his left. The
great gambler said:
“By George! Simmons, I did not know you had so much intelligence as
that. That symbolism of yours is very apt: Crime, Ignorance, and
Stupidity. Is that what the Appellate Court stands for?”
At my first interview with Canfield I got a taste of the man I was to
deal with. Clarence Luce was the architect who made the gambling house
on Forty-fourth Street, next to Delmonico’s, and he came to me with a
proposition to decorate it, saying that I was to talk the matter over
with Mr. Canfield himself. I, of course, decided he would know nothing
of art and it would be rather trying. I was mistaken. A short, fattish,
powerful man greeted me and said, only:
“I want your best work. You know what that is and I shall know it when I
see it. We’ll talk the money over later.”
This did not seem extraordinary to me at the time. Sad experience has
since taught me to do nothing without a contract, but I have always
found that with men of the character of Richard Canfield, nothing of the
sort is necessary. In working for John Dunston, proprietor of the famous
“Jack’s” Restaurant, I would paint a panel in my studio, take it down to
the room, and put it upon the wall, go directly to the office and get my
money—no criticism of my work and no arguments—just a man’s word, and as
to the artistic part of it, he considered my judgment better than his.
Like Napoleon, when Canfield wanted anything done, he employed the best
men and told them to go ahead. He became a great friend of Whistler’s
and has written one of the most interesting accounts of the painter that
I have read. Whistler painted Canfield’s portrait and doubtless found
him a congenial companion—as who would not? He knew life, he knew human
nature, he was an expert on guns and firearms and had killed his man or
I miss my guess; and yet I must say that Richard Canfield was a man in
every sense of the word and as much a gentleman as one who lives outside
the law can be. He was the god of all the smaller gamblers and had
helped more than one over the rough spots.
The house where fortunes were made and lost is standing to-day, and from
the outside resembles nothing more than the ordinary, narrow, three- or
four-story, brownstone dwelling place. In Canfield’s time, Clarence Luce
had managed to transform the interior until it was quite a gem in its
way. Entering by the big swing door, one stepped into a small vestibule
done in Numidian marble. In the ceiling were five rhomboidal panels of
thin jade behind which were lights casting a soft glow, Oriental in its
effect (one might imagine it to be Cleopatra’s bedroom), and giving a
thrill of mystery right at the start.
Before one was a solemn door and the usual grill with a bell. Upon
ringing, a huge negro peeked through, and one was admitted if one were a
friend. Behind this was a reception room, and here I painted Pandora and
her box with a great smoke, interspersed with figures, coming out of it;
while over the mantel of the room behind were Hospitality and her
attendants. The gambling room was on the next floor, and on the newel
post of the stairway was a charming little reproduction of the
“Bacchante” by Frederick MacMonnies, of which Anders Zorn said to me:
“For the first time I see this lady where she should be—in a gambling
house.”
The architect had scaled everything down to undersize, so that in this
narrow house things might look large. There must have been extra
chambers in the walls, as in the daytime there was nothing to be seen of
the tables or the wheels, and for aught one knew, it was a private home.
The back room, where was served any kind of drink or food (even to cold
partridge) that human ingenuity could conjure, was dark, of the dull
colors of Spanish leather, and this formed a contrast to the room where
the playing went on. This was light, with a carpet on the floor of
terre-verte plush so thick that one’s feet sunk into its depths without
making the slightest sound. I saw that the only color must come from the
faces of the men, the red spots on the table—and my decorations.
The spaces to be painted were two of those difficult cat-claw panels
(spandrels) at one end of the room, and these were also undersize. I
could not use a male figure, so made my “Night” and “Morning,” taken
from Swinburne’s lines,
When haughty Day represses
Night’s cold and faint caresses,
both from women models.
Along toward the beginning of my work things were not going well with me
financially; so late one night I dressed in evening clothes and went up
to see Canfield. He received me in the supper room, called the waiter to
bring a decanter of rye (which he never corked, but simply covered with
a fine linen napkin, thus allowing the fusel oil to evaporate), and then
asked me if I had come to play. I answered that I should not think of
doing so indelicate a thing while working for him. At that he nodded his
head saying, “I thought not.”
“I’m in great trouble,” I said.
“Well, a man can’t do his best work in that state. What is it?”
I made a clean breast of everything.
“The answer to all that is money,” he said, calling his secretary.
“Bring me a check for a thousand dollars,” and then to me, “Now run away
and do your best work.”
In regard to questions of gambling debts, Canfield was inexorable if he
was dealing with crooks (which are not always to be found in the lower
strata of society, by any means), but for a young man who had made his
first mistake he had nothing but kindness. A friend of mine was taken
(when a bit alcoholic), by an older man, to Canfield’s one night. After
a short time he found himself in debt to the house for several thousands
of dollars. He wrote out a check for the amount and went home. In the
morning he realized what he had done and that he did not have anything
like the amount to meet it. Bracing up, he groomed himself carefully and
called upon Mr. Canfield. That gentleman had not yet breakfasted and
seemed in no hurry to do so, for my friend waited several hours in the
reception room. I suspect that the astute gambler was giving him a
chance to show his mettle. When Canfield appeared, the boy (for he was
very young) made a clean breast of affairs, saying that neither himself
nor his family were in a position to meet the obligation, but that he
was there to offer all he had—his skin. Canfield listened attentively,
turned to his desk, picked up a paper, and said:
“Is this the check?”
My friend nodded.
“Well, don’t ever do this again,” he advised, tearing it up and throwing
it into the fire.
I once asked Canfield about an account in the papers of a young man in
one of our western cities whom he had sued for the payment of a bad
check of $45,000. It seemed to me foolish, for of course he could not
collect.
“Oh, I just did that to let you fellows know what a rotter the boy was,
that’s all,” he said. “The night he lost it he had turned up at my place
with his older brother and the manager of his father’s business here in
New York. When the young fellow began to lose heavily, my man came to me
for instructions. I asked his companions what to do. They said to let
him plunge, that the firm was good for it. Of course, the next day they
refused to pay. That is why I sued.
“But a few weeks later they needed me. The young man had got into
serious trouble which required a large amount of instant cash. It was
early Sunday morning and there was at that time no place in New York
where one could get money after banking hours. So the manager and the
young man’s brother turned up at my house, bringing with them a man
whose name, on paper, was good for millions. Here was my chance. They
needed $25,000 cash. I gave it to them in exchange for a check, signed
by the brother and backed by the rich man, for $70,000.”
I rather imagine that certain people had to leave for Montreal that
morning and did not stay upon the manner of their going.
When politics and the fine arts meet, there is sometimes a clash.
Senators and aldermen may be good lawmakers, but they are not always
judges of decorative painting. The funniest time I ever had was in
trying to decorate the Baltimore Law Courts building. La Farge and
Vedder had both refused the order, and I could easily see why, after my
own experience. There were seven rhomboidal panels in the entrance. The
first suggestion made to me was to have a representation of Francis
Scott Key finding that the “flag was still there.” As he must have been
below deck in a British war vessel at that moment, looking out of a
porthole, the only way to do him would have been from the back view,
while in the distance the flag would have been about the size of one of
his ears. I might have been able to vary this seven times, but I doubt
it.
Then they suggested Religious Liberty as a subject. My argument against
this was that it is an idea of the mind and not for the eye. Pope
Hildebrand, a most wicked man, would be a far more decorative
proposition than Bishop Potter, though not representing Religious
Liberty nearly so well. I tried to make a composition, but failed and
gave it up. I did propose, however, that it could be done by taking the
color red for the Church of Rome, raising the tone to a lively pink for
the Church of England, then a very faint rose shade for Unitarianism. In
this way the idea might be made to last out the seven panels, the last
being one where only the pure in heart could see any color at all.
Brander Matthews once gave me the best illustration that I know of a
purely literary subject that could not be painted. The ladies of New
York presented a flag to a Negro regiment. The color sergeant stepped
forward, as in duty bound, to accept it. He then should have stepped
back, but, being a negro, had to say something. So, saluting, he
remarked, “I’ll bring these colors back or I’ll report to God, the
reason why.” Now this is a fine tale, but how to paint it? One would
have a negro and a flag; the remainder would have to be printed
underneath.
Mistaking the subject for the artist is a great failing of a certain
type of mind. This was true of Freddie Remington. He was a darling and
we all loved him—one of those rare beings, a man without an enemy. When
he began painting he was lucky enough to stumble upon a new field, one
of great size, that had not been touched, and one that all America cared
for. The West, the cowboy, soldier, and miner were virgin soil, waiting
for his touch. Roosevelt, who did not know as much about painting as he
did about roughriding, wanted to have a statue erected to him as the
greatest American artist.
I do not believe the ordinary politician ever considers the fine arts
seriously. To him beauty is something for Sundays or holidays, and he
lets the women attend to it. At least, when we were in Washington some
years ago, making an attempt to have the tax on art removed, I had a
chance to judge the mental weight of one Congressman. I was asked to be
one of the party (as one of the minor speakers only), for I could tell
what I knew of the same matter in France and England. I was fool enough
to say, in the course of my argument:
“This may not go down with the woolly West, but it should in the East.”
Instantly a long young man, with a shock of dark hair falling over his
forehead, rose and said:
“What’s that, Mr. ——” (turning to his neighbor to ask my name)—“oh,
Simmons? What do you know about the West, if I may ask. How far west
have you ever been?”
I think he took it for granted that I was born (like Sargent) on the
other side. I answered:
“Three years under the shadow of Mount Shasta, Mr. Bryan.”
I knew William Jennings by sight and judged that he had not ventured so
far from his home town as I had. He was silenced by the chairman and
there was a chuckle.
Anders Zorn told me two stories about Grover Cleveland, showing the
extraordinary penetration and understanding of this statesman. While he
was doing a portrait of the President, at one time he took the canvas
and turned it upside down to look at it. To Cleveland’s questioning he
replied that he was doing it to see if he had painted the book too high
in value, adding:
“What do you think?”
“I suppose you painters use the word ‘value’ to mean the importance a
thing holds in its effect upon the eye of the beholder. Yes, I think it
is too high but why do you turn it upside down?”
Zorn was interested. “Why do _you_ think we do?”
“It must be to see it from a new point of view. To get a new conception
of it all.”
It was, but how keen of him to have thought it out!
Zorn asked Mrs. Cleveland what her husband’s friends thought of the
portrait. She replied that she did not know anyone who fitted that
description, that he had many acquaintances, but no one that she could
call his friend. It seems that the higher a man climbs, the farther
behind he leaves his associates. Shakespeare must have been very lonely
away up there on the mountain top.
There were two humps in the Monument Land near the Old Manse which were
supposed to be the graves of British soldiers killed in the
Revolutionary War. Hawthorne tells the legend of a boy who chopping wood
there at the time of the battle of Concord, saw one soldier fall, and
went over and finished him with his ax. When my dog Cuff used to start
digging at this place, I always wanted to let him go on, just to see if
one of the skulls was split. During this period of my life, no doubt
aided by the usual school history, I formed a definite idea of the
battle of Concord, and it was not until I tried to paint it for the
Boston State House that I found out the real truth of the matter. And my
enlightenment came from a Britisher!
I naturally started out with a composition of men in red coats, but,
thinking it over, decided to be sure, so I wrote to Trevelyan, author of
that wonderful history of the Revolutionary period, asking him where I
could get information. A very courteous reply told me that he was in the
country and that he did not have his books of reference with him, but
added, “Why do you not go to that excellent library of yours, the Boston
Athenæum, and consult the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for June, 1775? You’ll
find what you want there.”
I did find what I wanted, and a lot more. For instance, only one out of
ten British soldiers at Concord were redcoats. Those who fought at the
Bridge were the ones who afterward formed the “King’s Own”—a flying
wedge of two hundred men in dark-blue-and-black uniforms. Another little
error of the poet Longfellow’s is that Paul Revere may have been a very
good silversmith, but he never got to Concord. He was only one of a
group of men sent out to warn the countryside, and he, with many others,
was caught by the British and sent back to Boston. And then the flag!
Despite Betsy Ross, I shall have to confess that the Stars and Stripes
turned up the first time at the siege of Boston and were carried by a
body of Connecticut militia.
One of our well-known illustrators has made a drawing of Washington
reviewing his troops under the famous elm at Cambridge (again the flag
floating proudly in the breeze), the soldiers being carefully clothed in
Colonial uniforms. According to the statement of the Rev. William
Emerson, we find a blacksmith of Concord, during the siege of Boston,
which was after the battle at the Bridge, carrying his own gun and
wearing his leather apron. Also, Washington made a pathetic appeal to
Congress for some form of shirt that should distinguish his soldiers
from the citizens, saying that the only way he had to mark his officers
was a red, white, or blue ribbon which they wore in their coats.
About this point in my reading I stopped and changed my entire
composition, taking my cue from the letter which remains for us, from
the American commander at the Bridge. He says:
“I then sprang to my feet, crying, ‘Fire, fellow citizens! Fire!’”
Sprang to his feet? Where must he have been? Lying behind something. I
had shot, fished, and traveled over this land all my life—it was only
just across the river from our house—and there was nothing there in my
boyhood behind which a man could have hidden. I looked this up and found
there had formerly been a wall so that the market women during the
spring freshet could walk dry shod in the days of the Concord River’s
overflow.
Considering the fact that I had never seen green grass anywhere near
Boston on the 19th of April, it may seem strange that I put it into my
decoration. Of course, I preferred it for my color scheme, but I
actually found a letter from a woman of the period and of that date,
saying, “I saw green grass waving out of my window this morning.” It
appears that that year they had an unusually early spring.
[Illustration:
“THE RETURN OF THE FLAGS”
Panel by Edward Simmons, Boston State House
_Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print_
_Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston_
]
When I painted my second panel, I thought of the order that the Pope
gave to Raphael to paint him putting out a fire by the power of God. The
Pope naturally saw himself the principal figure and was disgusted when
he found that Raphael had made him a little figure on a balcony in the
distance, the artist preferring a group of maidens rushing around in the
foreground with jugs of water as being more interesting to paint. Now my
subject was War, and when I chose as my other panel “The Return of the
Battle Flags into the Custody of the State after the Civil War,” many
people naturally expected that the governor and officials would occupy
the prominent place on the canvas. The governor was an admirable man and
did a great deal toward winning the war, but in actual fact he was about
five feet high, “pot-gutted,” bald headed, and not an attractive object
from a painter’s point of view. I did not wish to do a group of
portraits, but a decoration, so I imagined myself in the park, looking
up at the State House, with a line of color sergeants marching up the
steps to present the flags to the governor and officials waiting above.
As they were two or three hundred feet away from the gate, I had to
reduce them to twelve or fifteen inches in height, thereby making
lifelong enemies of several who were still alive. When the G. A. R.
found I was not to do the officers, but the color sergeants, my trouble
was by no means over, for the wives and relatives of more than a dozen
sent me photographs of their beloved ones, some of whom were dead, some
of whom had lost an arm in the war. Many of the likenesses were of the
individual thirty years later than the day he carried the flag! _All_,
of course, expected to be represented in the decoration by a life-sized
portrait. I obviated this difficulty by making them march up the stairs
away from one, as they naturally would have done, and a back view is not
a good portrait.
The ceremony had taken place on a day in December, and it had snowed the
night before; so the next question that arose was that of the army
overcoat. I had seen many of them in my boyhood; all of the farmers wore
them in the fields. I took it for granted that it would be easy to get
one. I appealed to the G. A. R. of Boston, the G. A. R. of New York, and
the G. A. R. of Washington, D. C. There were none to be had. Finally, I
wrote to Sanger, a classmate of mine, who was the Assistant Secretary of
War, and found that there were some in the army archives and that all I
had to do was to go to Washington and look at them. They would even have
them taken out for me to examine thoroughly. This, of course, would do
me no good whatever. I must have one in my studio so that a model could
pose in it. My home and studio were at East Hampton, Georgica Pond, at
the time, and I was walking around my garden one day, feeling very low
in my mind, when my man of all work asked me what the matter was. I was
blue enough to tell anyone my troubles, and explained to him, with no
idea that he could help me.
“Why, old Jackson wears a coat like that,” he said.
I had no faith, but we harnessed up, drove several miles out, when, sure
enough (I spied it at a distance), there was old Jackson weeding out his
flower garden and wearing an original Civil War army overcoat. It was a
beauty, stained by time and faded by the sun; a real work of art, but he
thought me a great fool to give him an entirely new coat for it.
The last trouble was the flag. I found out that the maker of the flags
carried in the war was still alive and had one in his possession. It was
all battle worn and just what I wanted. After the panel was up the
Boston _Transcript_ published a letter from an indignant woman stating
that I had no right to monkey with Old Glory; that as an artist I might
have thought the flag would be better with gold stars, but that I had no
right to paint them so. The original flags were upon the wall of the
State House, about ten feet under my panel, and I replied to her, asking
that she take the trouble to go and look at them and see that the stars
were gold. Also, as they had been given to the regiments by the ladies
of Boston, the question was “up to them.”
This United States flag is one of the most undecorative things that an
artist has to use. Made like a crazy quilt, absolutely without an
æsthetic excuse, even the Barbarians do better. It is based on the
Washington shield, but is an exceedingly ugly arrangement of the colors.
At a distance it looks like a sweet pea; pretty, but never dignified. We
love it—not for its looks—but, as Desdemona loved Othello, “for the
dangers he has passed.”
I never understood Boston—or, in fact, New England—until I went back
there after having spent years in Europe. There are many delightful
qualities about the Bostonese type of mind, but their comprehension of
the senses only through abstract matters limits their personal
enjoyments. However, we cannot quarrel with them on some scores. Their
love of music, for instance. I have heard music in three places in my
life in such a way as to approach the indulgences of the Mad King of
Württemberg. If one is not alone, one must have the sense of being
alone; there must be no rustling of programs and no talking. Therefore
the perfect way to listen to music is to have an audience composed of
one’s friends. You cannot tell a stranger to “shut up,” but you can a
friend; and you can also ignore him and thus establish solitude.
In the Vaudeville Club, in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, where
every year he used to give a Sunday concert in memory of his dear friend
Welles’s birthday (as a rule it was a stringed quartet); and in the St.
Botolph Club of Boston, I have really enjoyed music. We had the Kneisel
and the Adamovski Quartets—the most wonderful music I ever heard. The
man sitting next to me might have been anybody from a prince to
Paderewski. I learned more about music and fell more in love with it
than I had in all the remainder of my life because I got it under
congenial surroundings.
Paderewski I never knew well, but have had the pleasure of playing many
a game of pool with him. It was said that he ate nothing and drank only
water during the day, if he was to play at night, a habit I can
understand; for whenever I have had the problem of making what was to me
a great composition, I have found it necessary to train for it by
exhausting my nervous forces, thereby rendering myself simple in
thought. So I imagine him drawing himself fine. After a performance he
would arrive at the St. Botolph Club, wanting much food and, when he had
fed, much fun. “Now let’s play poker; now let’s play pool.” It was not
the game, it was the sociability he wanted; because, once in it, he
never knew when it was his turn to play, never could remember to ante,
and talked all the time.
Paderewski comes nearer to being the traditional genius than any other
modern—all the eccentricities with the real stuff underneath. They say
he kept, in his younger days, a pet poodle to supply the requests he
received for locks of his hair. And then the story of the cherry stones
which a woman found lying on the corner of his mantelpiece one day and
appropriated, and which she had set in a pin of clover-leaf pattern.
Upon her calling the artist’s attention to it, he remarked: “That is one
of the carelessnesses of my valet. It must have been he who left them
there. Personally, I loathe cherries.”
One of the drawbacks of Bostonians is the lack of a true sense of humor.
The assistant professor of mathematics at the Technological School once
told me that he comprehended infinity. A large order, but he was
perfectly serious. While they are willing to claim such an advance in
one direction, they sometimes seem to have no realization of the advance
of the civilization of this earth. One of the younger members of my
family—upon moving to Richmond, Virginia, two or three years ago—was
admonished by an elderly spinster of Boston to “be sure and be kind to
those poor heathens in the South.” She meant the negroes!”
Boston is a city apart. It has nothing to do with the rest of the
country. Twenty years ago my mother, like all good Bostonians, stopping
at the Murray Hill Hotel here in New York, said:
“Only think, Edward, there are thirty Cabots sailing to-day on the same
steamer.”
She was much shocked when I remarked, “I hope it is a strong ship.”
Dr. Samuel Cabot’s house was always a revelation to me. It was full of
stuffed birds in glass cases. He was not without a sense of the
ridiculous, however, for when he was persuaded to go to see a picture by
his brother Edward (whom all the women worshiped for his artistic
tendencies), he said about this painting—entitled “Peace”—of two birds
building their nest in the mouth of a cannon:
“That’s just like Edward; both his birds are male.”
This desire of ignoring sex was paramount in many learned and otherwise
delightful folk. I remember William Ware and had great respect for him,
but I had to laugh at him. He was an architect of ability and a
professor at Columbia, loved by his pupils, but the kind of man who had
no respect for any idea that was not fifty years old—so that it was
certain to be absolutely true before he taught it. He told me once that
he had never been able to see any reason for women’s existence. It must
have been this side of his nature which caused him to go about with a
small hammer and eliminate all evidences of sex from the newly arrived
Greek masterpieces for the Boston Art Museum. He could not see anything
incongruous in the fact that the fig leaves (cast by the workman in the
Museum) were of a different color from the statues. Strange type of
mind—and yet he had cleverness and a certain wit. My aunt had asked her
husband to invite Professor Ware to dinner, but, thinking my uncle might
forget the message, wrote a letter in addition. The professor answered
both. The letters are records of brevity.
Dear Sophy: Yours with pleasure, W. W.
Dear James: Yours as to your wife, W. W.