GOLDEN SANDS
Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Mrs. Wm. Macbeth
Our sojourn in Villerville was a particularly important one for both of us, but in different ways. For him it was a period of absorption rather than of production, while, on that very account, exactly the reverse process went on in me. I have already said it was at his suggestion that I accompanied his Villerville drawings with an article which, Mr. Brownell afterward wrote me, was like “a Martin landscape put into words.” Homer perhaps thought so himself, for he had already said: “I see that you can paint with words. I wonder if you can set people in action. Why not try?” Whereupon I made a character sketch which Mr. Alden, of “Harper’s Magazine,” declined because “it was too painful,” but which the then editor of “Lippincott’s”—I think his name was Kirk—found too short, and wrote me that if I would lengthen it out so that it should bear less resemblance to a truncated cone, he would be glad to avail himself of it. Whereupon I recalled it, fished up my heroine out of an earthquake on the island of Capri which I had allowed to swallow her, but whom I now unearthed, none the worse except in the matter of a broken wrist,—I think it was a wrist,—and in a month or so received a very fair-sized check for the tale of her experiences.
The same sort of exterior pressure, not any interior need of expression, was what led to the production of a tale which ran for eighteen months as a serial in the “Catholic World” under the title of “Katharine,” and during that period provided for our necessary expenditures. Henry Holt republished it with a new name which he himself suggested. I liked the first one better, but it made too little difference to me to make it worth while to adhere to my own views. Mr. Kirk, by the way, had also renamed my sketch: that seems to be a privilege with literary sponsors, the literary parent not being present. Almost an entire chapter was also eliminated from the book, because the reader, whose name I never knew, objected to it on the ground that it showed too plainly that “Mrs. Martin really believed” that a certain tenet of her faith was absolutely true.
I began a second story on the heels of this one, but when it had run to some thirty thousand words, Homer objected to it as certain to split upon the same dogmatic rock as its predecessor, and I laid it aside for a third one which attained the same proportions and pleased every one who then or thereafter read it better than either of its predecessors. But it had the misfortune of not specially interesting me; and yet there was a baby in it with the second sight, who bade fair to develop into something “mystic, wonderful,” in course of time, if not interfered with. Meantime, the imperative need for production on my part having ended, I put the unfinished manuscript in the fire some three years ago. The second one I completed after our return to New York, and it was published under the title of “John Van Alstyne’s Factory,” in the “Catholic World.”
To Homer our life in France was chiefly seed-time. There germinated his “Low Tide at Villerville,” the “Honfleur Lights,” the “Criquebœuf Church,” the “Normandy Trees,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Sun Worshipers,” and the landscape known in the Metropolitan Gallery of New York, where it now hangs, as a “View on the Seine,”—which, in strictness, it is not,—but for which his own title was “The Harp of the Winds.” I had asked him what he meant to call it, and, with his characteristic aversion to putting his deeper sentiments into words, he answered that he supposed it would seem too sentimental to call it by the name I have just given, but that was what it meant to him, for he had been thinking of music all the while he was painting it. And this reminds me of a commission given him by a music-lover among his friends during our early days in New York to “paint a Beethoven symphony” for him. He did it, too, and to the utmost satisfaction of its possessor.
ON THE SEINE (“HARP OF THE WINDS”)
Reproduced from the original painting in the Metropolitan Museum, New York
He used to carry about with him in those days a pocket sketch-book in which he noted his impressions in water-color. Mr. Brownell must remember it, and so, I think, must Mr. Russell Sturgis, for, being at our rooms during my husband’s last sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic, when he was known to be afflicted with an incurable malady, he said to me that if Homer’s things were ever put up for sale, he would like to become the purchaser of this book. My husband never got over his chagrin when it became evident that it must have fallen a prey to some unscrupulous packer of our household goods at the time when he concluded to follow me to St. Paul, in June, 1893. He had a suspicion that it might have found its way to a pawnbroker, and never gave up hoping for its ultimate recovery. It had in it some delightful miniature bits of character and color.