A large photograph of the Erechtheum has survived with the above-named personages standing or sitting upon the steps of that sublime temple, second in glory only to the Parthenon, near which it stands upon the Acropolis of Athens.
There was much of fun, frolic, and laughter in those days of wandering. Minerva knew how to make what was really a time of intense mental activity seem nothing but play. Froebel was outclassed, and her traveling kindergarten afforded an opportunity for education I have never known equaled.
CHAPTER XIII
Boston in the Eighties
A notebook of anatomical drawings recalls my adventure as a student at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Frederick Crowninshield taught us anatomy and much besides; I remember with gratitude his excellent teaching.
After a year or two, I realized that art was not my affair. Beside my studies in Rome with Costa, I had worked a season in Paris. All I had to show for this were some passable paintings of flowers. I lacked the artist hand. While I have continued to study art from that day to this, I then definitely renounced the idea of becoming a painter, yielding to the inevitable family calling of literature. I had learned that it is not enough to feel the love of beauty, the yearning for artistic expression; an artist must have art in his fingers as well as in his soul.
Among our neighbors at this time were the Q.’s, parlous dull people. Meeting my mother one day, Mrs. Q. told a story of her daughter, ending with:
“I said then, ‘Charlotte is the most wonderful of us all!’”
As no one had ever thought any of the Q.’s wonderful, the phrase amused my mother so much that she used it all her life.
When I brought her a check for nine dollars from Godey’s Magazine for my first story, “May Blossom”, she exclaimed, “Well, Miss, it appears that you are the most wonderful of us all!” I spent this, the first money I ever earned, on a plaster cast of the Venus of Milo.
I now began to write regularly for the Boston Transcript: occasionally for the New York Tribune, the World, and the current magazines. Much of my Transcript work was art reviewing. Among other artists, this brought me in touch with John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Albert Ryder, and Charles Walter Stetson. I was one of the first writers to cry aloud the excellence of the work of these and many another American artist, and was, in consequence, persona grata at the studios.