JOURNALISM
Given a disposition to enter into controversies on art questions,
provoked by the general incompetence of the newspaper critics of
that day, and the fact that there was at that time no publication in
America devoted to the interests of art, it happened naturally that I
was drawn into correspondence with the journals on art questions, and
easily made for myself a certain reputation in this field. I obtained
the position of fine-art editor of the "Evening Post," then edited by
W.C. Bryant, a position which did not interfere with my work in the
studio. My duties on the paper were light and pecuniarily of no
importance, though the "Post" was the journal which, of all the
New York dailies, paid most attention to art, and had the highest
authority in questions of culture. My relations with Bryant were
intellectually profitable to me. He was a man who enjoyed the highest
consideration amongst our contemporary journalists,--of inflexible
integrity in politics as well as in business affairs. The managing
editor was John Bigelow, a worthy second to such a chief. Bryant was
held to be a cold man, not only in his poetry, but in his personal
relations; but I think that, so far as his personality was concerned,
this was a mistake. He impressed me as a man of strong feelings, who
had at some time been led by a too explosive expression of them
to dread his own passions, and who had, therefore, cultivated a
repression which became the habit of his life. The character of his
poetry, little sympathetic with human passion, and given to the
worship of nature, confirmed the general impression of coldness which
his manner suggested. I never saw him in anger, but I felt that the
barrier which prevented it was too slight to make it safe for any
one to venture to touch it. A supreme sense of justice went with a
somewhat narrow personal horizon, a combination which, while it made
him hold the balance of judgment level, so far as the large world of
politics was concerned, made him often too bitter in his controversies
touching political questions; but the American political daily paper
has never had a nobler type than the "Evening Post" under Bryant.
Demonstrative he never was, even with his intimates, but to the
constancy and firmness of his friendship all who knew him well could
testify, and, as long as he lived, our relations were unchanged,
though my wandering ways brought me seldom near him in later years.
It was about this time that I had become acquainted with the Browns.
Of Mrs. Brown I have, in anticipation of events, spoken in connection
with spiritism, apart from which she had a remarkable individuality
in many ways. She had those instantaneous perceptions of truth in the
higher regions of thought, the spiritual and moral, which seem to be
either instinct or inspiration. Their house was the meeting place of
a school of transcendental thinkers (and I use the word in its full
sense) of a very remarkable character. As the Browns lived on the
Brooklyn side of the East River, we used to call it the "Brooklyn
School," though there were residents of Philadelphia and Boston among
the friends who met there. Now and then we had formal _conversazioni_,
and at these I soon took a prominent part, though the inquiring spirit
strongly predominated over the oracular, which is likely to monopolize
such assemblies. I was in that eagerness of early and incomplete
knowledge which is more ready in expression than that of riper years,
and it is probable that I distinguished myself by fluency of verbiage.
It became customary to look to me for the most hazardous reaches of
conjecture or inquiry, though certainly Mrs. Brown was worth far more
than I was. I had already solved several problems which to-day are not
clear to me, and I had always a ready answer to most mysteries. Talk I
certainly could, and Mrs. Brown, who had the most sincere friendship
for me, and believed in my possibilities if not in my attainment,
delighted to put me forward.
One day there was a _conversazione_ at which Alcott, the "Oracle of
Concord," was to be the chief personage, and, as he had the habit of
monopolizing the talk when he took any part, it was suggested that
I should try my strength against his. Although Emerson had a high
opinion of Alcott, he seemed to me a shallow and illogical thinker,
and I have always felt that the good opinion of Emerson was due rather
to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up
in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to
Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather in oracular
and often incomprehensible verbiage than in profundity of thought,
but, as no one attempted to bring him to book, bewildered as his
audience generally was by the novelty of the propositions he made or
by their absurdity, he used to go on until suggestion, or breath,
failed him. I have forgotten, long ago, the subject of debate, but
Alcott started out with one of his characteristic mysticisms, and,
after allowing him to commit himself fully, I interrupted him with a
question. He was a little irritated at being stopped in the flow of
his discourse, and showed it, but this did not disturb me, and I
insisted on an explanation of what he had said. He was not in the
habit of explaining himself, and replied very much at random, but the
training of old Dr. Nott stood me in good stead, and I followed him up
with question and objection until he assumed a position diametrically
opposed to that from which he started, when I called his attention
to the fact that what he then said contradicted what he had at first
said. He got angry, and replied that "a man was not bound to be
consistent with himself, and that it did not matter." But he lost
his thread as well as his temper, and the _conversazione_ came to a
premature end, to the great satisfaction of the conspirators, most of
whom had at one time or another been silenced in their attempts to
bring him to logical conclusions, by his autocratic way of carrying on
the debate without regard to objections, which they had not had the
courage to urge.
He seemed to me a shallow philosopher, but I must confess that my
treatment of him did not become a man so much younger than he. I felt,
however, a certain amount of honest indignation at what seemed to
me his charlatanic manner of putting off on people his random and
improvised suggestions regarding questions which seemed to me then of
vital importance to society. It is easy now to see that I was in the
stage of mental evolution at which detail is of supreme importance
because large views of life and philosophy have not yet come above the
horizon. Alcott was a drawing-room philosopher, the justice of whose
lucubrations had no importance whatever, while his manner and his
individuality gave to wiser people than I the pleasure which belongs
to the study of such a specimen of human nature. He amused and
superficially interested, and he no doubt enjoyed his distorted
reflections of the wisdom of wiser men as much as if he had been an
original seeker. I did not then understand that all knowledge is
relative, and that, _au fond_, his offense was the same as mine, that
of thinking he had arrived at finality in the discovery of truth.
It was, perhaps, a natural consequence of all this talking and writing
about art that, in the absence of a periodical devoted to it, my
friends came to the conclusion that it would be a good and useful
thing that I should start an art journal. I had read with enthusiasm
"Modern Painters," and absorbed the views of Ruskin in large draughts,
and enjoyed large intercourse with European masters, and with
Americans like William Page, H.K. Brown, S.W. Rowse, and H.P. Gray,
all thinkers and artists of distinct eminence. In this school I
had acquired certain views of the nature of art which I burned to
disseminate. They were crude rather than incorrect, but they were
largely responded to by our public; they were destructive of the old
rather than informing of the new, and leaned on nature rather than
art. The art-loving public was full of Ruskinian enthusiasm, and what
strength I had shown was in that vein. The overweening self-confidence
that always carried me into dangers and difficulties which a little
wisdom would have taught me to avoid, made me too ready to enter into
a scheme which required far more ability and knowledge of business
than I possessed. All my artist friends promised me their assistance,
and I found in John Durand, the son of the president of the National
Academy of Design, a partner with a seconding enthusiasm and the
necessary assistance in raising the capital. This amounted to $5000,
for the half of which my brother Thomas became security. We doubted
not that the undertaking would be a lucrative one, and one of the
principal motives which was urged on me by my artistic friends and
promising supporters was that it would furnish me with a sufficient
income to enable me to follow my painting without any anxiety as to my
means of living. We started a weekly called "The Crayon," and at
the outset I was able to promise the assistance of most of our best
writers residing in New York.
In order to secure the support of the Bostonians I went to Boston and
Cambridge, where I was met by a cordial response to my enthusiasm,
Lowell becoming my sponsor to the circle of which he was then and for
many years the most brilliant ornament. To him and his friendship in
after years I owe to a very large degree the shaping of my later life,
as well as the better part of the success of "The Crayon." He was then
in a condition of profound melancholy, from the recent death of his
wife. He lived in retirement, seeing only his most intimate friends,
and why he should have made an exception in my case I do not quite
understand. It may be that I had a card of introduction from his great
friend William Page or from C.F. Briggs (in the literary world, "Harry
Franco"), but if so it would have been merely a formal introduction,
as my acquaintance with either of those gentlemen was very slight,
and I do not remember an introduction at all. My impression is that I
introduced myself. But I was an enthusiast, fired with the idea of an
apostolate of art, largely vicarious and due to Ruskin, who was then
my prophet, and whose religion, as mine, was nature. In fact, I was
still so much under the influence of the "Modern Painters" that, like
Ruskin, I accepted art as something in the peculiar vision of the
artist, not yet recognizing that it is the brain that sees and not the
eye. But there is this which makes the nature-worshiper's creed a more
exalting one than that of the art-lover, that it is impersonal and
compels the forgetting of one's self, which for an apostolate is
essential.
It was probably this characteristic of my condition which enlisted the
sympathy of Lowell, who, even in his desolation, had a heart for any
form of devotion, and who, with the love of nature which was one of
his own most marked traits, had a side to which my enthusiasm appealed
directly. The mere artist is, unless his nature is a radically
religious one, an egotist, and his art necessarily centres on him,
nature only furnishing him with material. I was dreaming of other
things than myself or that which was personal in my enterprise, and
Lowell felt the glow of my enthusiasm. He introduced me to Longfellow,
Charles Eliot Norton, R.H. Dana, and other of his friends at
Cambridge, and at a later visit to Agassiz, Emerson, Thomas G.
Appleton (Longfellow's brother-in-law), Whittier, E.P. Whipple,
Charles Sumner, and Samuel G. Ward, banker and a lover of art of high
intelligence, the friend of poets and painters, and to me, in later
years, one of the kindest and wisest of advisers and friends.
Lowell invited me to the dinner of the Saturday Club,--a monthly
gathering of whatever in the sphere of New England thought was most
eminent and brilliant,--and here I came, for the first time, into
contact with the true New England. It may be supposed that I returned
to New York a more enthusiastic devotee of that Yankeeland to which
I owed everything that was best in me. In my immediate mission,--the
quest of support for "The Crayon,"--I had abundant response in
contributions, and Lowell himself, Norton, and "Tom" Appleton, as he
was called familiarly by all the world, continued to be amongst my
most faithful and generous contributors as long as I remained the
editor. Longfellow alone of all that literary world, though promising
to contribute, never did send me a word for my columns, not, I am
persuaded, from indifference or want of generosity, but because he was
diffident of himself, and, in the scrutiny of his work, for which, of
course, the demand from the publishers was always urgent, he did not
find anything which seemed to him particularly fit for an art journal.
Nor would any of those contributors ever accept the slightest
compensation for the poems or articles they sent, though "The Crayon"
paid the market price for everything it printed to those who would
accept. The first number of "The Crayon" made a good impression in all
the quarters from which praise was most weighty and most desired by
its proprietors. Bryant and Lowell had sent poems for it, but I had to
economize my wealth, and could print only one important poem in each
number, and to this I gave a page, so that I had to choose between the
two. Bryant had sent me a poem without a title, and when I asked him
to give it one he replied, "I give you a poem, give me a name;" and I
called it "A Rain Dream," which name it bears still in the collected
edition of his works. Lowell sent me the first part of "Pictures from
Appledore," one of a series of fragments of a projected poem,--like
so many of his projects, never carried to completion. The poem was
intended to consist of a series of stories told in "The Nooning," in
which a party of young men, gathered in the noon spell in the bowl
formed by the branches of a pollard willow,--one of those which stood,
and of which some still stand, by the river Charles,--were to tell
their personal experiences or legends drawn from the sections of New
England from which they came. Bryant's greater reputation at that time
made his contribution more valuable from a publishing point of view,
especially in New York, where Lowell had as yet little reputation,
while Bryant was, by many, regarded as the first of living American
poets. But my personal feeling insisted on giving Lowell the place at
the launch, and to reconcile the claim of seniority of Bryant with
my preference of Lowell puzzled me a little, the more that Lowell
insisted strongly on my putting Bryant in the forefront as a matter of
business. I determined to leave it to Bryant, whose business tact was
very fine, and who had as little personal vanity as is possible to a
man of the world, which, in the best sense, he was. But I prepared the
ground by writing a series of articles on "The Landscape Element in
American Poetry," the first of which was naturally devoted to Bryant,
and then, taking him the poem of Lowell and the article on himself, I
asked his advice as to the decision, saying that I could only print
his poem or Lowell's, but that I desired to take in as wide a range
of interest as possible. He decided at once in favor of the poem of
Lowell and the Bryant article in the landscape series.
The success of "The Crayon" was immediate, though, from a large
journalistic point of view, it was, no doubt, somewhat crude
and puerile. It had a considerable public, sympathetic with its
sentimental vein, readers of Ruskin and lovers of pure nature,--a
circle the larger, perhaps, for the incomplete state of art education
in our community. That two young men, without any experience in
journalism, and with little in literature, should have secured the
success for their enterprise which "The Crayon" indisputably did enjoy
was a surprise to the public, and, looking at it now, with my
eyes cooled by the distance of more than forty years, I am myself
surprised. That "The Crayon" had a real vitality, in spite of its
relative juvenility, was shown by the warm commendation it received
from Lowell, Bryant, and other American literati, and from Ruskin, who
wrote us occasional notes in reply to questions put by the readers,
and warmly applauded its tone. Mantz was our French correspondent,
and William Rossetti our English, and a few of the artists sent us
communications which had the value of the personal artistic tone. But
I learned the meaning of the fable of "The Lark and her Young," for
the general assistance in the matter of contributions, promised me by
the friends who had originally urged me to the undertaking, was very
slow in coming, and, for the first numbers, I wrote nearly the whole
of the original matter, and for some time more than half of it. I
wrote not only the editorial articles and the criticisms, but essays,
correspondence, poetry, book notices (really reading every book I
noticed), and a page or two of "Sketchings," in which were notes from
nature, extracts from letters, and replies to queries of the readers.
I remained in the city all the burning summer, taking a ten days' run
in the Adirondacks in September. I kept office all day, received
all who came to talk art or business, and did most of my writing at
night,--not a régime to keep up one's working powers. Durand did some
excellent translations from the French, and the late Justin Winsor
sent us many translations, both of verse and prose, from the German,
as well as original poetry. Aldrich was a generous contributor.
Whittier, Bayard Taylor, and others of the lyric race sent occasional
contributions, and amongst the women, who were, as a rule, our most
enthusiastic supporters, were Mrs. Sigourney, and, not the least by
far, Lucy Larcom, the truest poetess of that day in America, who gave
us some of her most charming poems. She was teacher in a girls'
school somewhere in Massachusetts, and I went to see her in one of my
editorial trips. We went out for a walk in the fields, she and her
class and myself, and they looked up to me as if I were Apollo and
they the Muses; and we went afield in many things. Henry James, the
father of the novelist, was also a not infrequent contributor; and,
amongst the artists, Huntington, President Durand (the father of my
associate), Horatio Greenough, and William Page appeared in our pages,
with many more, whose names a file of "The Crayon" would recall.
During the year, Lowell received the appointment of Professor of
Modern Languages at Harvard, and on the eve of his sailing from New
York we gave him a dinner, to which, besides some of his old friends,
such as E.P. Whipple and Senator Charles Sumner, I invited Bryant and
Bayard Taylor. I knew that Bryant held a little bitterness against
Lowell for the passage in the "Fable for Critics," in which he said:--
"If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole;"
and I told Lowell how the dear old poet felt, and then put them
together at the table. Lowell laid himself out to captivate Bryant,
and did so completely, for his tact was such that in society no one
whom he desired to interest could resist him; and our dinner was a
splendid success. Of all present at it only Durand and myself are now
living.
The subscription list of our paper had risen in the first month to
above 1200, and the promise for the future seemed brilliant. But,
unfortunately, neither of us understood the business part of
journalism, or that a paper does not live by its circulation, but by
advertisements; and that our advertisements, being a specialty, must
be canvassed for vigorously. We did not canvass. Cunning publishers
persuaded us that it would be a good thing to take their
advertisements for nothing, so as to persuade the others that we had a
good advertising list. But the bait never took, and we never got the
paying list, and the printer, being interested in our expenditure,
never helped us to economize, but played the "Wicked Uncle" to our
"Babes in the Wood," and so we wasted our substance. It was, perhaps,
fortunate that the funds ran short as they did, for our five thousand
dollars could not go far when the subscriptions were all paid in
and spent, and the overwork began to tell on me fatally. With the
conclusion of the third volume I broke down and had to give up work
entirely.
When I got out of harness, and had no longer the stimulus of the daily
demand and habit of work, the collapse was such that I thought I was
dying. I gave my share of the paper to Durand, to do as he pleased
with, and went off to North Conway, in the mountains of New Hampshire,
to paint one more picture before I died. I chose a brook scene,
and Huntington and Hubbard--two of our leading painters--and a
Düsseldorf-educated painter, by name Post, sat down with me to paint
it. I gave six weeks of hard work to a canvas twelve by eighteen
inches, and my competitors cordially admitted my victory. Autumn fell
on my work with still something to do to it, and it was never finished
to my entire satisfaction, but it was one of the successes of the year
at the Academy Exhibition. I stayed late amongst the mountains, only
thinking of dying, but nature brought me round. There came, towards
the end of the season, a newly married couple from Boston, destined
in later years to become a large part of my life,--Dr. and Mrs.
Amos Binney. Mrs. Binney was one of the earliest women graduates in
medicine in America,--an earnest, true woman, whose ministrations to
me in body and mind, in those months of dying hopes, flying leaves,
and early snowfalls, were full of healing. I had had a skirmish with
Cupid that summer, my first real passion, reciprocated by the subject
of it, one of the ardent readers of "The Crayon," an enthusiast in
art, and like me in Ruskin--an affair which ended in our double defeat
under the merciless veto of the mother of my flame. In that affair
Mrs. Binney's tact and knowledge of human nature befriended me
profoundly, and were the origin of a cordial intimacy which
incidentally had on my subsequent life a great influence. Dr. Binney
gave me a commission for two pictures, and invited me to come to his
home near Boston to paint them.