The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

One day there was a conversazione at which Alcott, the "Oracle of Concord," was to be the chief personage, and, as he had the habit of monopolizing the talk when he took any part, it was suggested that I should try my strength against his. Although Emerson had a high opinion of Alcott, he seemed to me a shallow and illogical thinker, and I have always felt that the good opinion of Emerson was due rather to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather in oracular and often incomprehensible verbiage than in profundity of thought, but, as no one attempted to bring him to book, bewildered as his audience generally was by the novelty of the propositions he made or by their absurdity, he used to go on until suggestion, or breath, failed him. I have forgotten, long ago, the subject of debate, but Alcott started out with one of his characteristic mysticisms, and, after allowing him to commit himself fully, I interrupted him with a question. He was a little irritated at being stopped in the flow of his discourse, and showed it, but this did not disturb me, and I insisted on an explanation of what he had said. He was not in the habit of explaining himself, and replied very much at random, but the training of old Dr. Nott stood me in good stead, and I followed him up with question and objection until he assumed a position diametrically opposed to that from which he started, when I called his attention to the fact that what he then said contradicted what he had at first said. He got angry, and replied that "a man was not bound to be consistent with himself, and that it did not matter." But he lost his thread as well as his temper, and the conversazione came to a premature end, to the great satisfaction of the conspirators, most of whom had at one time or another been silenced in their attempts to bring him to logical conclusions, by his autocratic way of carrying on the debate without regard to objections, which they had not had the courage to urge.

He seemed to me a shallow philosopher, but I must confess that my treatment of him did not become a man so much younger than he. I felt, however, a certain amount of honest indignation at what seemed to me his charlatanic manner of putting off on people his random and improvised suggestions regarding questions which seemed to me then of vital importance to society. It is easy now to see that I was in the stage of mental evolution at which detail is of supreme importance because large views of life and philosophy have not yet come above the horizon. Alcott was a drawing-room philosopher, the justice of whose lucubrations had no importance whatever, while his manner and his individuality gave to wiser people than I the pleasure which belongs to the study of such a specimen of human nature. He amused and superficially interested, and he no doubt enjoyed his distorted reflections of the wisdom of wiser men as much as if he had been an original seeker. I did not then understand that all knowledge is relative, and that, au fond, his offense was the same as mine, that of thinking he had arrived at finality in the discovery of truth.

It was, perhaps, a natural consequence of all this talking and writing about art that, in the absence of a periodical devoted to it, my friends came to the conclusion that it would be a good and useful thing that I should start an art journal. I had read with enthusiasm "Modern Painters," and absorbed the views of Ruskin in large draughts, and enjoyed large intercourse with European masters, and with Americans like William Page, H.K. Brown, S.W. Rowse, and H.P. Gray, all thinkers and artists of distinct eminence. In this school I had acquired certain views of the nature of art which I burned to disseminate. They were crude rather than incorrect, but they were largely responded to by our public; they were destructive of the old rather than informing of the new, and leaned on nature rather than art. The art-loving public was full of Ruskinian enthusiasm, and what strength I had shown was in that vein. The overweening self-confidence that always carried me into dangers and difficulties which a little wisdom would have taught me to avoid, made me too ready to enter into a scheme which required far more ability and knowledge of business than I possessed. All my artist friends promised me their assistance, and I found in John Durand, the son of the president of the National Academy of Design, a partner with a seconding enthusiasm and the necessary assistance in raising the capital. This amounted to $5000, for the half of which my brother Thomas became security. We doubted not that the undertaking would be a lucrative one, and one of the principal motives which was urged on me by my artistic friends and promising supporters was that it would furnish me with a sufficient income to enable me to follow my painting without any anxiety as to my means of living. We started a weekly called "The Crayon," and at the outset I was able to promise the assistance of most of our best writers residing in New York.

In order to secure the support of the Bostonians I went to Boston and Cambridge, where I was met by a cordial response to my enthusiasm, Lowell becoming my sponsor to the circle of which he was then and for many years the most brilliant ornament. To him and his friendship in after years I owe to a very large degree the shaping of my later life, as well as the better part of the success of "The Crayon." He was then in a condition of profound melancholy, from the recent death of his wife. He lived in retirement, seeing only his most intimate friends, and why he should have made an exception in my case I do not quite understand. It may be that I had a card of introduction from his great friend William Page or from C.F. Briggs (in the literary world, "Harry Franco"), but if so it would have been merely a formal introduction, as my acquaintance with either of those gentlemen was very slight, and I do not remember an introduction at all. My impression is that I introduced myself. But I was an enthusiast, fired with the idea of an apostolate of art, largely vicarious and due to Ruskin, who was then my prophet, and whose religion, as mine, was nature. In fact, I was still so much under the influence of the "Modern Painters" that, like Ruskin, I accepted art as something in the peculiar vision of the artist, not yet recognizing that it is the brain that sees and not the eye. But there is this which makes the nature-worshiper's creed a more exalting one than that of the art-lover, that it is impersonal and compels the forgetting of one's self, which for an apostolate is essential.

It was probably this characteristic of my condition which enlisted the sympathy of Lowell, who, even in his desolation, had a heart for any form of devotion, and who, with the love of nature which was one of his own most marked traits, had a side to which my enthusiasm appealed directly. The mere artist is, unless his nature is a radically religious one, an egotist, and his art necessarily centres on him, nature only furnishing him with material. I was dreaming of other things than myself or that which was personal in my enterprise, and Lowell felt the glow of my enthusiasm. He introduced me to Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, R.H. Dana, and other of his friends at Cambridge, and at a later visit to Agassiz, Emerson, Thomas G. Appleton (Longfellow's brother-in-law), Whittier, E.P. Whipple, Charles Sumner, and Samuel G. Ward, banker and a lover of art of high intelligence, the friend of poets and painters, and to me, in later years, one of the kindest and wisest of advisers and friends.

Lowell invited me to the dinner of the Saturday Club,—a monthly gathering of whatever in the sphere of New England thought was most eminent and brilliant,—and here I came, for the first time, into contact with the true New England. It may be supposed that I returned to New York a more enthusiastic devotee of that Yankeeland to which I owed everything that was best in me. In my immediate mission,—the quest of support for "The Crayon,"—I had abundant response in contributions, and Lowell himself, Norton, and "Tom" Appleton, as he was called familiarly by all the world, continued to be amongst my most faithful and generous contributors as long as I remained the editor. Longfellow alone of all that literary world, though promising to contribute, never did send me a word for my columns, not, I am persuaded, from indifference or want of generosity, but because he was diffident of himself, and, in the scrutiny of his work, for which, of course, the demand from the publishers was always urgent, he did not find anything which seemed to him particularly fit for an art journal. Nor would any of those contributors ever accept the slightest compensation for the poems or articles they sent, though "The Crayon" paid the market price for everything it printed to those who would accept. The first number of "The Crayon" made a good impression in all the quarters from which praise was most weighty and most desired by its proprietors. Bryant and Lowell had sent poems for it, but I had to economize my wealth, and could print only one important poem in each number, and to this I gave a page, so that I had to choose between the two. Bryant had sent me a poem without a title, and when I asked him to give it one he replied, "I give you a poem, give me a name;" and I called it "A Rain Dream," which name it bears still in the collected edition of his works. Lowell sent me the first part of "Pictures from Appledore," one of a series of fragments of a projected poem,—like so many of his projects, never carried to completion. The poem was intended to consist of a series of stories told in "The Nooning," in which a party of young men, gathered in the noon spell in the bowl formed by the branches of a pollard willow,—one of those which stood, and of which some still stand, by the river Charles,—were to tell their personal experiences or legends drawn from the sections of New England from which they came. Bryant's greater reputation at that time made his contribution more valuable from a publishing point of view, especially in New York, where Lowell had as yet little reputation, while Bryant was, by many, regarded as the first of living American poets. But my personal feeling insisted on giving Lowell the place at the launch, and to reconcile the claim of seniority of Bryant with my preference of Lowell puzzled me a little, the more that Lowell insisted strongly on my putting Bryant in the forefront as a matter of business. I determined to leave it to Bryant, whose business tact was very fine, and who had as little personal vanity as is possible to a man of the world, which, in the best sense, he was. But I prepared the ground by writing a series of articles on "The Landscape Element in American Poetry," the first of which was naturally devoted to Bryant, and then, taking him the poem of Lowell and the article on himself, I asked his advice as to the decision, saying that I could only print his poem or Lowell's, but that I desired to take in as wide a range of interest as possible. He decided at once in favor of the poem of Lowell and the Bryant article in the landscape series.

The success of "The Crayon" was immediate, though, from a large journalistic point of view, it was, no doubt, somewhat crude and puerile. It had a considerable public, sympathetic with its sentimental vein, readers of Ruskin and lovers of pure nature,—a circle the larger, perhaps, for the incomplete state of art education in our community. That two young men, without any experience in journalism, and with little in literature, should have secured the success for their enterprise which "The Crayon" indisputably did enjoy was a surprise to the public, and, looking at it now, with my eyes cooled by the distance of more than forty years, I am myself surprised. That "The Crayon" had a real vitality, in spite of its relative juvenility, was shown by the warm commendation it received from Lowell, Bryant, and other American literati, and from Ruskin, who wrote us occasional notes in reply to questions put by the readers, and warmly applauded its tone. Mantz was our French correspondent, and William Rossetti our English, and a few of the artists sent us communications which had the value of the personal artistic tone. But I learned the meaning of the fable of "The Lark and her Young," for the general assistance in the matter of contributions, promised me by the friends who had originally urged me to the undertaking, was very slow in coming, and, for the first numbers, I wrote nearly the whole of the original matter, and for some time more than half of it. I wrote not only the editorial articles and the criticisms, but essays, correspondence, poetry, book notices (really reading every book I noticed), and a page or two of "Sketchings," in which were notes from nature, extracts from letters, and replies to queries of the readers.

I remained in the city all the burning summer, taking a ten days' run in the Adirondacks in September. I kept office all day, received all who came to talk art or business, and did most of my writing at night,—not a régime to keep up one's working powers. Durand did some excellent translations from the French, and the late Justin Winsor sent us many translations, both of verse and prose, from the German, as well as original poetry. Aldrich was a generous contributor. Whittier, Bayard Taylor, and others of the lyric race sent occasional contributions, and amongst the women, who were, as a rule, our most enthusiastic supporters, were Mrs. Sigourney, and, not the least by far, Lucy Larcom, the truest poetess of that day in America, who gave us some of her most charming poems. She was teacher in a girls' school somewhere in Massachusetts, and I went to see her in one of my editorial trips. We went out for a walk in the fields, she and her class and myself, and they looked up to me as if I were Apollo and they the Muses; and we went afield in many things. Henry James, the father of the novelist, was also a not infrequent contributor; and, amongst the artists, Huntington, President Durand (the father of my associate), Horatio Greenough, and William Page appeared in our pages, with many more, whose names a file of "The Crayon" would recall.

During the year, Lowell received the appointment of Professor of
Modern Languages at Harvard, and on the eve of his sailing from New
York we gave him a dinner, to which, besides some of his old friends,
such as E.P. Whipple and Senator Charles Sumner, I invited Bryant and
Bayard Taylor. I knew that Bryant held a little bitterness against
Lowell for the passage in the "Fable for Critics," in which he said:—

"If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole;"