Mr. Morgan’s connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art dated from 1871, when the institution was organized. For twenty-five years he was one of the trustees, and since 1904 he had been president. He took an intense interest in its upbuilding, contributing thereto not only of his wealth but of his time and affection. So conspicuous was his identification with the art museum that it obscured his relations with the American Museum of Natural History, on the other side of Central Park. Yet these were equally close and well-nigh as important, involving forty years’ activity as a trustee and long service, first as treasurer and again as vice-president. Here, too, his gifts were lavish. His love of beauty showed itself in the presentation to the museum of large and choice collections of minerals and precious stones; but these were only a small part of his contributions, which included money for endowment, maintenance and research, as well as innumerable objects for exhibition.
Owing largely to modern facilities for travel and communication, the personality of the American Mæcenas was probably better known in foreign countries than that of any private citizen of the past. He was a very familiar figure in England, where he succeeded years ago to the headship of his father’s firm, as well as to the ownership and yearly occupancy of his father’s town house and country-seat; where most of his collections were kept for many years; and where his gift to St. Paul’s Cathedral showed his lively interest in the Church of England and in the City of London. He was equally well known in France, where he was the head of a banking-house and a benefactor of his favorite health resort, Aix-les-Bains; in Germany, where his presentation of an important letter of Luther’s to the Imperial Government was heartily appreciated; in Italy, where he endeared himself to Pope and people by the restoration of the cope of Ascoli, and where his last hours were passed; and finally in Egypt, the antiquities as well as the climate of which had an attraction for him that grew constantly stronger. Moreover, his fame as a collector made him an object of intense, if not altruistic, interest in the various lands in which he sojourned.
Having achieved an international reputation as a maker of money for his clients and customers, as well as for himself, Mr. Morgan found no less pleasure, but rather more, in making a new and quite as wide a reputation as a spender. His collections were made en prince. He never haggled over a bargain, but took a thing on the seller’s terms or left it. When he declined a book, a manuscript, or an object of art at the owner’s price, he must have been aware that that price was exorbitant; for his purchases were made with an open hand, many of them at figures that somewhat discounted the appreciation in values when competition should have become even keener than it was when he entered the field. His activities as a buyer doubtless caused a general rise in the price of rarities—an inevitable result of the rather rapid making of a collection that has recently been insured for $23,000,000 and would probably fetch a much larger sum if disposed of under favorable conditions. In estimating the commercial value of such a collection, it must be borne in mind that the number of masterpieces is virtually fixed, while the number of potential competitors for their possession continually increases.
When Mr. Morgan bought the house adjoining his father’s former home, No. 13 Princes Gate, London, joined the two, and filled the addition with things for which there had been no space before—having a room especially designed to hold the series of Fragonards; when he left in the National Gallery the Colonna Raphael, for which he had given a hundred thousand pounds or so; when he filled case after case in the South Kensington Museum with priceless treasures, he had no prevision that by far the greater part of his collections would be coming, before long, to New York. Their departure did not follow hard upon the passage of the law exempting from tariff charges works of art more than twenty years old. But when Mr. Morgan learned, last year, from Mr. Lloyd-George’s own lips, that if he should die while his collections remained in England, his estate would have to pay $300,000 or more on the Raphael alone, he promptly arranged to transfer his treasures to his own country, where the death duties are less onerous. And now that they are safely arrived, word comes, through his will, that in due time they may become permanently accessible to the American people. Already the literary treasures, safeguarded in the exquisite library building adjoining his house in Thirty-sixth Street, are accessible to accredited students and amateurs; hundreds of his art works—paintings, porcelains, carvings, tapestries, etc.—are on view in the Metropolitan Museum; and only the erection of a suitable building (presumably in the form of an addition to the museum itself) delays the revelation of the full extent of the rich and varied collections the acquisition of which gave so keen a zest to the financier’s later years.
Of Mr. Morgan’s many activities, he enjoyed none more keenly, and found none more beneficial, than yachting. As many days and hours as he could spare, he passed aboard his steam yacht, the Corsair, often spending the summer nights in New York Bay or on Long Island Sound, early in the week, and running up the Hudson, to his country home, for the week-end. Longer trips were made to Newport or Bar Harbor—with the New York Yacht Club, when its annual cruise was on; at other times with only his personal guests. From 1897 till 1899, he was the club’s commodore; and his hand went deep into his pocket to build the Columbia, which defended the America’s cup in the last of these years, and was used as a trial boat in 1901, when Reliance was the defender. The Corsair of 1891 (a 242-foot boat) was sold to the Government, as other yachts were, when we were at war with Spain, in 1898. As the Gloucester, under Captain Wainwright, she gave a very good account of herself at Santiago. That year the Sagamore served as flagship; but on the very day the Commodore sold the Corsair he had commissioned her designer, Mr. J. Beavor Webb, to build a boat sixty-two feet longer than the old one; and the next year the new Corsair was launched.
Mr. Morgan’s private signal was known in Europe as well as in home waters, though he never crossed the ocean on anything but a great liner, usually the flagship of the White Star Line. This line—the chief subsidiary of the International Mercantile Marine Company, one of his many organizations—was in a sense his pet; and the sinking of the Titanic, in whose construction he had taken the keenest interest, was probably a heavier blow to him than to any one to whom it did not bring personal bereavement.
Mr. Morgan’s great liking for collies is known to all lovers of dogs, and the Cragston kennels are decorated with many a first prize won at the Madison Square Garden and elsewhere. As a rule, the animals, young and old, are confined to their own quarters, well away from the house, and separated from the house grounds by the public road that runs along the bluff on the west shore of the Hudson at this point. Despite the comfort, not to say luxuriousness, of their surroundings indoors, they are always overjoyed to be let out; and one of their owner’s keenest pleasures was to see them released; to watch them dash, in a pack, to the gateway, turn sidewise in the air as they sprang through, then tear like mad down the road in the direction of Highland Falls and West Point, yelping as if possessed. After running a few hundred yards, they would turn as suddenly as they had started, and race back, passing the gate at full speed, and dashing another hundred rods or so, before turning again.
“Sefton Hero,” or some other great prize-winner, was likely to be seen about the house in the daytime; but to only one collie was granted the privilege of permanent occupancy. This was a dog that had been in the habit of running down the private road to meet his master on the arrival of the yacht, the private signal of which he had learned to recognize. One afternoon, in his zealous haste, he failed to see a railway train that arrived just as he reached the riverside. The cow-catcher struck him and tossed him many feet, but happily he landed on a bit of swampy ground with no bones broken. His devotion, with its almost fatal consequences, won him special privileges for the rest of his days.
Not long after the completion of Mr. Morgan’s greatest work as an organizer, he was the chief guest at a dinner of the Gridiron Club, in Washington—one of those functions where the newspaper “boys” have fun with the great ones of the earth. It was, of course, impossible to get him to talk; but leaving the room, late at night, his arm linked in that of his old friend Mr. George F. Baker, he exclaimed, “If only I were a speaker, how I should have liked to talk for an hour to-night, and tell them the story of the organization of the Steel Corporation!” He may have felt an equally strong impulse to unbosom himself on other occasions, but if so he repressed it.
An invincible shyness, which seemed hardly consistent with the man’s dominating forcefulness, made him as sedulous in avoiding publicity as many are in courting it. On certain occasions it was impossible for him to escape the spot-light; but when its rays fell full upon him his discomfort was obvious. Such an occasion was the dedication of the New Theatre, now the Century. As chairman, it was Mr. Morgan’s duty to receive the silver key of the building from the architect. For once he had to take the center of the stage in only too literal a sense. As he sat there throughout the addresses of Senator Root and Governor Hughes, alternately glancing at, and crumpling up, the scrap of paper on which his notes were written, it was an easy guess that the remotest corner of the attic would have been a preferable place of waiting; and when his turn came, and he had pronounced his two or three formal sentences, his relief was evident. Once, when he was called on for a speech, he said, “No, no, gentlemen; I have never made a speech in my life, and I’m not going to begin now.”