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

by Edward Simmons

“Speak to her just this once. I won’t tell,” said Ned Higginson, who was my keeper.

I argued I mustn’t, but he assured me it would be all right, so I did. When it came to the final reckoning and he was asked if I had kept the rules, he told on me. I don’t believe I was ever so righteously angry in my life. Disregarding the fact that it was a formal party and I was in evening clothes, I turned and would have knocked him down had they not held me. Then I heard laughs and cries of:

“Yes, he’s the kind of a man we want.”

You must be the type who trusts your friends by doing (while blindfolded) anything that he swears on his honor he has done before you, but if it is proven that that friend has deliberately gone back on you, you must show that you resent it. For example, my anger at Ned was pardoned; but a son of one of the generals in the Civil War went through all the requirements until he refused to put on some article of clothing which seemed to him filthy (his eyes being bandaged), in spite of the fact that all of the others swore they had gone through the same experience without harm. He never became a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

One of the requirements is an essay which is taken very seriously by the patient neophyte, but is really of no importance. Mine, on the subject of “Public Insane Asylums vs. Private Mad Houses,” was never read, for the reason that it was stolen by a ring within the club who called themselves “Owls of the Night” and thought it very funny to reduce the size of the new man’s head by destroying his work whenever possible. I was sure I had hidden my essay where no one would find it—in the bottom of the spittoon, covered with layers of newspapers, then melted candle grease, and lastly, the remaining space filled with water and cigar butts. But my roommate told; and I had to lie, when asked for it, so as not to go back on the gang.

One of the most interesting possessions of the club was the Crocodile Book, or the record kept by the secretary since the beginning. At the end of one of the chapters was a charming drawing by Washington Allston, of a fat boy gobbling mush from a pot. I used to stare at this and wonder about the man who did it. Alas! when I went back, some twenty years later, there was no trace of the drawing and no one could be found who had ever heard of it.

These acts of vandalism are found more often among the educated classes than otherwise. I often think of the clergyman who was found with a hammer in his hand, having just knocked a piece off a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which dated back to the days of Edward the Confessor—the only one that had never been cracked or harmed! The judge very wisely did not punish him, but left him to the tender mercies of the newspaper reporters. He is still running. We have not the right to destroy the labor of some one else. The beautiful things of Greece, the wisdom of Rome, music of Germany, and the Cathedrals of France and Italy have been inherited from the past, and if we deface them we are defacing our own property.

I have my small triumphs. One occurred in the Hasty Pudding Club. When I went back for a visit after coming home from Europe, I was shown a fine building, positively shaming the rooms we had had in Stoughton Hall. I went in with a somewhat bewildered manner, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Then something struck my eye. Where had I seen it before? There at the end of a hall was a drawing—a playbill for a performance of “The Rivals”—of two cocks, one black and the other of the yellow barnyard type, fighting over a little white hen. Looking in the corner, I saw it was signed with my name!

It is better than money, family, or friends when a whole generation embraces you. My personality was not there; neither is that of the man who made the Venus di Milo—but she’s there. There are contests as to who wrote the plays we ascribe to Shakespeare, but there are no contests over Hamlet. It’s great to see that what you have tried to do has been kept.

There is a poem by Arthur Macy (probably not published) about a Common Councilman who in walking down the street and, happening to look up at the Boston Public building, sees a shield and upon it the design by Saint-Gaudens, of two little naked boys. It runs something like this: