It was I who went first to St. Paul, where our elder son resided, hoping to recover by means of a long rest from the fatigue entailed by incessant mental labor. I had been editing, reviewing, translating, finishing a novel, besides keeping house, and began to feel as if my own mainspring were liable to snap at any moment. This was at the end of December, 1892. I went, intending to return, and to continue the writing of book reviews during my absence. But in February I broke down completely, gave up all work and all expectation of resuming it in New York. In the following June, Homer resigned his studio and followed me, stopping on the way to see the Chicago Exposition, where several of his paintings were on view.
In St. Paul he had for a while a very good studio in one of the life insurance buildings, and while there completed several pictures, among them that of the “Criquebœuf Church,” selling it, almost as soon as it reached New York, to Mr. William T. Evans. This building was sold, soon afterward, and converted to uses which made it impossible as a studio.
If my memory serves me correctly, it was in the spring of 1894 that the Century Club had a reunion of more than ordinary importance. The special date and occasion I do not recall, but I know that Homer’s presence was so urgently desired by some of his friends that he then paid his last visit to New York, and to the place and associates in it which had given him most satisfaction. He was absent some six weeks, possibly more, and I have since been told that when he left, his physical condition was such that his friends not merely gave up hope of seeing him again, but expected speedy tidings of his death. But the end was not so near. It was to be preceded by such a conquest of mind over matter, of sheer will over propensities both inherited and acquired, of triumphant performance in the face of physical obstacles apparently insurmountable as is altogether unique in my experience. Such efforts are never made, I take it, except under the stimulus of hope, and even that sheet-anchor often fails when the soul is pusillanimous. But Homer Martin was no coward. Moreover, he had always been his own severest critic. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler has quoted him as saying in earlier years when the hangmen exalted him “above the line” in exhibitions, and buyers accepted that verdict as conclusive: “If I could only do it, they would see it fast enough.” Mr. Schuyler adds: “But this was more modest than exact. Even after he had attained the capacity to ‘do it,’ to make canvas palpitate with light and color, as the visitors to the Memorial Exhibition know, the picture-buyers of twenty years ago still failed to ‘see it.’”
CAPE TRINITY
Reproduced from the original drawing in the collection of Mr. Wm. Macbeth
But, at the period of his life with which I am now concerned, he was not only conscious that he had attained full mastery of his own power of artistic expression by means of color, but he had reason to believe that an opportunity had been afforded him to make that mastery triumphantly evident. Although his faith turned out to be ill-founded, yet his belief to the contrary was sufficient to make him rise at once to his full strength and shake off without apparent effort whatever other shackles had hitherto confined him. He was like nothing so much as blind Samson after his hair had grown, and he carried off the gates of old habits and flung them aside as easily as if he had never felt their weight. In the late spring of that year he went away alone to a quiet farm, taking with him the canvases on which “The Adirondacks,” the “Seine View,” and the “Normandy Farm” were already charcoaled, and set to work at their development and completion. From time to time he would come into the city, his step alert and his physical improvement so apparent in every way, that my apprehension that his health was already shattered irreparably gave way to confidence that years of life and successful achievement were still before him. As for him, I think he never fully believed that the doctors were right in considering his bodily condition hopeless until a short time before his death. He had always looked confidently forward to such length of days as both of his parents and others of his more remote forbears had attained. “I never thought,” he said to me one night, a week or two before his death, “that I was shortening my life in this way.” As to his blindness, it never became entire, and having been accustomed from the beginning to defective vision while yet absorbing his material through the eye and appealing to it in his production, he had, in a measure bewildering to hear of and barely credible to us who beheld it in its final efforts, learned to rely almost entirely on his inward vision and the hand which responded as it were instinctively to its impulse and suggestion.
The pictures I have named went to New York in the late autumn of 1895, and were at once acknowledged with hearty words of praise and a preliminary check. My husband was back at home by this time, and, full of vigor and the anticipation of assured success, had begun three or four other landscapes. Only one of these was ever completed, but that was so present to his imagination, and his steady hand moved in such obedience to his will, that it took visible shape almost without an effort. He had begun making plans for the future and seemed to have renewed his youth. And then, when the year was nearly ended, his hopes were shattered by the tidings that the pictures were found to be unsalable, and had been, or were to be, transferred to other hands which might or might not be more successful in finding purchasers for them.
This was the end, so far as further work was concerned. My Samson fell once more into the hands of the Philistines, and this time not to rise again.
