It was a long dinner. Every one present would have been glad to express his affection and admiration for America’s greatest man-of-letters, and those who must be heard were so numerous that it was nearly two o’clock in the morning before Mark Twain’s turn arrived to respond. As he rose, the entire company rose with him, each standing on his chair and waving his napkin enthusiastically. Mark Twain was visibly affected by the outburst of enthusiasm. When the excitement subsided, I could see the tears streaming down his cheeks, and all thought of the set speech he had prepared and sent to the press for publication was entirely forgotten. Realizing that the following quotation differs from the official report of the event, I venture to rely upon the notes I personally made during the dinner. Regaining control of himself, Mark Twain began his remarks with words to this effect:
When I think of my first birthday and compare it with this celebration,—just a bare room; no one present but my mother and one other woman; no flowers, no wine, no cigars, no enthusiasm,—I am filled with indignation!
Charles Eliot Norton is a case in point in my contention that to secure the maximum from a college course a man should take two years at eighteen and the remaining two after he has reached forty. I was not unique among the Harvard undergraduates flocking to attend his courses in Art who failed utterly to understand or appreciate him. The ideals expressed in his lectures were far over our heads. The estimate of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, that Mr. Norton was foremost among American thinkers, scholars, and men of culture, put us on the defensive, for to have writers such as these include Norton as one of themselves placed him entirely outside the pale of our undergraduate understanding. He seemed to us a link connecting our generation with the distant past. As I look back upon it, this was not so much because he appeared old as it was that what he said seemed to our untrained minds the vagaries of age. Perhaps we were somewhat in awe of him, as we knew him to be the intimate of Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, as he had been of Longfellow and George William Curtis, and thus the last of the Cambridge Immortals. I have always wished that others might have corrected their false impressions by learning to know Norton, the man, as I came to know him, and have enjoyed the inspiring friendship that I was so fortunate in having him, in later years, extend to me.
In the classroom, sitting on a small, raised platform, with as many students gathered before him as the largest room in Massachusetts Hall could accommodate, he took Art as a text and discussed every subject beneath the sun. His voice, though low, had a musical quality which carried to the most distant corner. As he spoke he leaned forward on his elbows with slouching shoulders, with his keen eyes passing constantly from one part of the room to another, seeking, no doubt, some gleam of understanding from his hearers. He told me afterwards that it was not art he sought to teach, nor ethics, nor philosophy, but that he would count it success if he instilled in the hearts of even a limited number of his pupils a desire to seek the truth.
As I think of the Norton I came to know in the years that followed, he seems to be a distinctly different personality, yet of course the difference was in me. Even at the time when Senator Hoar made his terrific attack upon him for his public utterances against the Spanish War, I knew that he was acting true to his high convictions, even though at variance with public opinion. I differed from him, but by that time I understood him.
“Shady Hill,” his home in Norton’s Woods on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, exuded the personality of its owner more than any house I was ever in. There was a restful dignity and stately culture, a courtly hospitality that reflected the individuality of the host. The library was the inner shrine. Each volume was selected for its own special purpose, each picture was illustrative of some special epoch, each piece of furniture performed its exact function. Here, unconsciously, while discussing subjects far afield, I acquired from Mr. Norton a love of Italy which later was fanned into flame by my Tuscan friend, Doctor Guido Biagi, the accomplished librarian of the Laurenziana Library, in Florence, to whom I have already frequently referred.
Our real friendship began when I returned from Italy in 1902, and told him of my plans to design a type based upon the wonderful humanistic volumes. As we went over the photographs and sketches I brought home with me, and he realized that a fragment of the fifteenth century, during which period hand lettering had reached its highest point of perfection, had actually been overlooked by other type designers (see page [16]), he displayed an excitement I had never associated with his personality. I was somewhat excited, too, in being able to tell him something which had not previously come to his attention,—of the struggle of the Royal patrons, who tried to thwart the newborn art of printing by showing what a miserable thing a printed book was when compared with the beauty of the hand letters; and that these humanistic volumes, whose pages I had photographed, were the actual books which these patrons had ordered the scribes to produce, regardless of expense, to accomplish their purpose.
The romance that surrounded the whole undertaking brought out from him comments and discussion in which he demonstrated his many-sided personality. The library at “Shady Hill” became a veritable Florentine rostrum. Mr. Norton’s sage comments were expressed with the vigor and originality of Politian; when he spoke of the tyranny of the old Florentine despots and compared them with certain political characters in our own America, he might have been Machiavelli uttering his famous diatribes against the State. Lorenzo de’ Medici himself could not have thrilled me more with his fascinating expression of the beautiful or the exhibition of his exquisite taste.
Each step in the development of the Humanistic type was followed by Mr. Norton with the deepest interest. When the first copy of Petrarch’s Triumphs came through the bindery I took it to “Shady Hill,” and we went over it page by page, from cover to cover. As we closed the volume he looked up with that smile his friends so loved,—that smile Ruskin called “the sweetest I ever saw on any face (unless perhaps a nun’s when she has some grave kindness to do),”—and then I knew that my goal had been attained (page [32]).