Though this was a delightful trip, one might say, an ideal trip, he was homesick, sea sick, and, as he says of himself, of all the party the most ignorant, the most untravelled, the most silent. It was a new experience to him, this going with a crowd. I know he often spoke of the expedition's cheer, and how they would all give it when they came into stations—
Who are we!
Who are we!
We're the Harriman, Harriman
H. A. E.! H. A. E.!
and "how the people would stare at us!" Father said. He liked it, this jolly comradeship and crowd spirit, but it was new to him, almost painfully new, and though no one had more human sympathy, more tenderness and understanding with human weaknesses and shortcomings, no one had less of the crowd spirit. As he said, he kept aloof—not from aloofness but from embarrassment and shyness. Later he overcame most of this and was able to face a crowd or an audience with composure and sureness. With this picture in mind another is recalled, one of him here at Riverby on summer days, scraping corn to make corn cakes. With an armful of green corn that he had picked, I can see him seated and with one of Mother's old aprons tucked under his beard. He would carefully cut down the rows of kernels and then with the back of a knife would scrape the milk of the corn into a big yellow bowl. He would hold the white ears in his brown hands and deftly cut each row, a look of composure and serenity in his eyes. He could eat his share of the cakes, too, and I like to think of those summer days. That fall he wrote from Slabsides:
Nov. 30, 1899
MY DEAR JULIAN,
I am over here this morning warming up and making ready for dinner. Hud and his wife and your mother are coming over soon. We are to have a roast duck and other things and I shall do the roasting and baking here. I wish you were here too. It is a cloudy day, but still and mild. I keep pretty well and am working on my Alaska trip—have already written about ten thousand words. The Century paid me $75 for two poems—three times as much as Milton got for "Paradise Lost." The third poem I shall weave into the prose sketch. The N. Y. World sent a man up to see me a couple of weeks ago to get me to write six or seven hundred words for their Sunday edition. They wanted me to write on the Thanksgiving turkey! Offered me $50—they wanted it in two days. Of course I could not do it off-hand in that way. So I fished out of my drawer an old MS, that I had rejected and sent that. They used it and sent me $30. It was in the Sunday World of Nov. 19.
I have sold four lots here for $225. One house will be started this fall. Wallhead and Millard of P. If I don't look out I will make some money out of this place yet. Your mother begins to look more kindly upon it. A N. Y. sculptor has bought the rock beyond the spring for $75. Van and Allie are ditching and cleaning the swamp of the Italians below here.
Photography is not an art in the sense that painting or music or sculpture is an art. It is nearer the mechanical arts. Nothing is an art that does not involve the imagination and the artistic perceptions. All the essentials of photography are mechanical—the judgment and the experience of the man are only secondary. A photograph can never be really a work of art. You can put those statements in the form of a syllogism.
I hope you are better of your cold. Some building burned up in Hyde Park early last night. Robert Gill shot himself in N. Y. the other day—suicide. We shall be very glad to see you again.
Your loving father,