From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

by Edward Simmons

Chapter XII: Fine Arts in Relation to “A Number of Things”

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.

“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.

“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.