There were several guides in the Capitol employed to show the visitors around and explain the sights to them. I thought it would be splendid for me to give them special instructions about my work, so that they would not make the usual ludicrous mistakes. But guides seem to be a different breed of animal chosen for the wide range of their imaginations. I supposed everything was going all right, when one day a particularly loquacious one came to me and showed me a miniature palette in his buttonhole, telling me he was an artist himself and belonged to a club of artists. He knew all about the ladies in my decoration—the one veiled in chiffon (which I had made for Hope) he called Sin, entirely neglecting the nude woman in the foreground (Sin) clinging to a grizzly (Savagery). He had probably received his early education in and about a Burlesque show.
It was in St. Paul that I saw the most wonderful collection of paintings ever gathered together (as far as I know) by a private individual. Mr. J. J. Hill had built a special room, especially lighted with everything adequate to show them to the best advantage. And such pictures! He had numbers of Corots—one of the nude Magdelen—Millet’s “Goose Girl,” and beautiful Daubignys. One Corot (of Biblis) was stunning. I could have lain on my back under the trees of the landscape and gone miles and miles through the distances between the clouds.
There were capitals and capitols to decorate after St. Paul, but none of them such a large order. In the Law Courts of Mercer, Pennsylvania, I put figures representing the different characteristics of the law; at Des Moines, Iowa, I was given a long and narrow half-moon panel, twenty-five or thirty feet in length and only about five feet in width at the center, and they would have for a subject, the Presentation of the Flag to the First Regiment that went to the Civil War. Of course, I couldn’t get in a human figure and a flag in the proper way, so I made an awkward girl holding it and letting it sag to the ground.
In the Capitol of Pierre, South Dakota, I painted a panel of the Lewis and Clark expedition which camped at about this place. I made the river and the bluffs, with a voyageur in a coonskin cap sitting on an overturned canoe and bargaining with an Indian who is showing him a buffalo pelt. An amusing incident, which my friends would say shows how “Simmy always falls on his feet,” is the way I painted the Indian. The librarian of the building was a great expert on Indian lore and had ferreted out much obscure knowledge, much to the annoyance of some of the painters, who were constantly having to change their figures to agree with his statements. I made an Indian with two braids of hair, but later added another, as he had his back turned and it suited my composition. This librarian wrote me an enthusiastic letter saying that he had supposed himself the only man in existence who knew that the tribe of Sioux Indians that lived in South Dakota were the only ones who wore their hair in three braids.
About this time (I was sixty years old) I thought it wise to stop and take cognizance of myself. My work was too literal, too full of details, and I wondered what the causes could be. First, there was my natural timidity. As a boy, I was taught not to fight. Surrounded by women all my childhood, with natural tendencies to stay in the house and read or draw, the baby of the family and always ailing—all these circumstances kept me away from a rough-and-tumble boy’s life. I can remember only one real fight in my young days. It was when I was seven years old.
I had a little spotted overcoat which in the opinion of the authorities had gotten too shabby. It must have been very old, for it was given to the small son of our washerwoman, a boy about my age. In front of the schoolhouse one day, we were coasting, when some one put a stick on the coast. I hit it and was thrown off my sled. It happened again, and I realized that it had been intentional. I lost my temper and threatened all sorts of things happening to the boy who did it, and dared him to do it again.
It happened again. I was furious and told the offending boy to step out. Lo! my washerwoman’s son with my overcoat on! Of course, I was badly pummeled, but I can remember the mystic feeling of striking my spotty overcoat. Though I really was worsted in the battle, I bore but few signs of it, and as he got a black eye, when asked who won I very meanly pointed to the evidence and left the questioner to his own inference.
This quality of timidity has always been accompanied in my nature by a great love of heroic deeds, and I find that it is so of many persons of my type. My brother told me of meeting Charles Reade when he went to England with the Harvard crew to row a match with Oxford. Mr. Reade lived close by, on the Thames, and he dined and wined the boys. In return they invited the author to go out in the launch to see them get into their shell. This very tall man, whose stories redounded with feats of bravery, walked down the fixed steps which led to the float, but when he felt the raft moving under his feet, he drew back and would go no further.
Reade was also overwhelmed by love of facts and could always produce the proof of any statement he made. (I see a lot of myself in this.) The great joke among the Harvard boys was when he declared, after a long recital of something that he thought had occurred in America:
“I found the statement in one of the reputable journals of your country”—and he produced the Police Gazette!