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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY Gift of
J, P. Gushing

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
1875-1900

BY

GAMALIEL BRADFORD
Author of " Union Portraits," " Confederate Portraits "
" Portraits of Women," etc

With Illustrations

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
tS^e iftiberifitie ^tees Cambdbge
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1920, I92I, AND 1922, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920 AND I92I, BY THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PIUNTED IN THE U.S.ik.

TO
GARLAND GREEVER

BERNADILLE
C 'est ce que I 'on appelle le coeur humain.
MARGOT
Le coeur humain ?
BERNADILLE
(^a ne devrait pas etre comme ga, et c'est comme ga.
COQUEBERT
Le philosophe s'en itonne.
BERNADILLE
Le moraliste s'en afflige — il s'en afflige, le moralistel mais
c'est tout de meme comme ga. MEILHAC AND HALEVY

PREFACE
This group of portraits is the first of a series in which I
hope to cover American history, proceeding backwards
with four volumes on the nineteenth century, two on
the eighteenth, and one on the seventeenth. My mten-
tion is to include representative figures in all the varied
lines of life, statesmen and men of action, writers,
lartists, preachers, scholars, professional men, and men
prominent in the business world. Among the numerous
difliculties of such an undertaking, not the least is that
of entering into the special achievements' of all these
distinguished persons. To judge what they accom
plished, it would be necessary to be expert in their
different pursuits. But I am concerned with their souls
and deal with their work only as their souls are illus
trated in it.
I am aware that in the present volume I have not
carried out my aim so fully as I could wish. There are
too many writers and artists. Blaine and Cleveland go
far to restore the balance with practical life. And
among the literary and artistic figures there is an
ample variety and richness of contrast. But I should
like to have included a man of pure science, and
especially one of the men of large business capacity who
are so typically American. What has balked me has
been the diflficulty of obtaining satisfactory material.
With literary men such material is always abundant.
PoUticians have plenty of friends — or enemies — to
record their experiences, if they do not do it themselves.
ix

PREFACE
But the man of science is apt to be expressed wholly in
his scientific investigation, and the man of business
lives his work and does not write it. I hope, however,
to return at a later period to the closing years of the
nineteenth century and develop some of the striking
figures who have teased my curiosity without satisfy
ing it.
There are two drawbacks to any successful portrayal
of one's contemporaries. The first is that it is pecu
liarly difficult to clear one's impression of prejudice.
One can survey great persons of a hundred years ago
with a fair amount of detachment from partisan views
and personal sympathies. But men we have known, or
whose friends we have known, come before us with a
cloud of secondary associations which tend to confuse
the fundamental spiritual issues. We are inclined to
please somebody, or to spare somebody, or to annoy
somebody. Even the coolest and most impartial find it
hard to escape such influences. Sainte-Beuve himself,
so broad and moderate in dealing with the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, is obviously unjust and un
reasonable with many of the great writers of his own
day. Again, the study of contemporaries is compUcated
by the constant appearance of new material. One
examines every existing document with the utmost
care and, alas, makes up one's mind. Then new records,
new letters, new analyses, are published, and one has
to unmake it, or reconsider the making, and one is
never sure that one is doing it fairly. To take a striking
instance. My portrait of Mark Twain was completed

PREFACE
before I read Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's "Ordeal of
Mark Twain." I endeavored to master Mr. Brooks's
point of view. It seemed to me that I did so, and that,
while I recognized its brilliancy and ingenuity, it did
not essentially affect my own original conception. But
I shall never be sure that, if I had read Mr. Brooks
first, my portrait would not have been different — and
better. Another experience of this nature has occurred with
Henry Adams. My study, founded on the "Educa
tion" and the various works pubUshed by Adams
himself, was completed before the appearance of the
"Letters to a Niece" and the "Cycle of Adams Let
ters." The introduction to the former book suggested
some important modifications. But in this case it was
most interesting to find the main lines of the portrait
confirmed in the striking series of letters exchanged
between the Adamses, father and sons. What more is
needed to show the identity of the Henry Adams of
the Civil War and the Henry Adams of the "Educa
tion" than this passage, addressed to him by his elder
brother in 1862: "You set up for a philosopher. You
write letters a la Horace Walpole; you talk of loafing
round Europe; you pretend to have seen life. Such
twaddle makes me feel like a giant Warrington talking
to an infant Pendennis. You 'tired of this Ufe'! You
more and more ' callous and indifferent about your own
fortunes'! . . . Fortune has done nothing but favor
you and yet you are 'tired of this life.' You are beaten
back everywhere before you are twenty-four, and
finally writing philosophical letters you grumble at the
xi

PREFACE
strange madness of the times and haven't faith in God
and the spu-it of your age. What do you mean by
thinking, much less writing such stuff?" (Cycle, vol i,
p. 102.) To which, for completeness, we may add these
words of Henry himself: "A man whose mind is bal
anced like mine, in such a way that what is evil never
seems unmixed with good, and what is good always
streaked with evil; an object seems never important
enough to call out strong energies till they are ex
hausted, nor necessary enough not to allow of its
failure being possible." (Cycle, vol. i, p. 195.)
To the complications which peculiarly affect work
on contemporaries must be joined an increasing sense
of the difficulty of accompUshing the portrayal of souls
at all. More than ever I feel that such portrayal, at
least as I can perform it, has no final value. Souls
tremble and shift and fade under the touch. They
elude and evade and mock you, fool you with false
lights and perplex you with unpenetrable shadows, till
you are ahnost ready to give up in despair any effort to
interpret them. But you cannot give it up ; for there is
no artistic effort more fascinating and no study so
completely inexhaustible.
If the substance on which we have to found spiritual
interpretation could be relied on, we might have more
confidence in the superstructure. But the further we
go, the more our confidence is shalten. Take one special
form of material, the report of words and conversations.
All historians and biographers use such report, are
tempted to use it much more than they do. Yet hov\^
abominably uncertain it is and must be. Who of us
xii

PREFACE
can remember for an hour the exact words he himself
used, even important words, significant words? Much
more, who can remember such words of any one else?
Yet diarists and biographers will go home and set down
at the end of a long evening, or perhaps a day or two
later, elaborate phrases which the alleged speaker may
have used, and much more likely may not. And this,
when the turn of a sentence may alter the light on a
man's soul! Of such materials is biography made. I
should not wish any one to have more confidence in
mine, at least, than I have myself.
I desire to acknowledge generally the courtesy and
helpfulness of many correspondents who have offered
useful suggestions and corrected errors. And for the
opportunity of profiting by these, I must chiefly thank
the editor of the Atlantic Monthly whose steady and
cordial support and sympathy enable me to prosecute
my work with an enthusiasm which I could hardly
draw from any other source. Gamaliel Bradford
Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts
January, 1922

CONTENTS

I. Mark Twain

1

II. Henry Adams

29

III. Sidney Lanier

59

IV. James McNeill Whistler

85

V, James Gillespie Blaine

113

VI. Grover Cleveland

143

VII. Henry James

171

VIII. Joseph Jefferson

197

Notes

225

Index

243

ILLUSTRATIONS

Samxjel Langhorne Clemens

Frontispiece

Henry Adams

30

From a drawing by James Brooks Potter

Sidney Lanier

60
James McNeill Whistler
86
James G. Blaine
114
Grover Cleveland
144
Photograph by Pach Brothers, New York
Henry James
172
From a painting by J. S. Sargent, R.A. Photograph
by Emery Walker, Limited, made by permission of
the Director of the National Portrait Gallery
Joseph Jefferson 198
Photograph by Sarony, New York
AMERICAN PORTRAITS
1875-1900 I
MARK TWAIN

CHRONOLOGY
Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Born, Florida, Missouri, November 30, 1835.
Pilot on the Mississippi, 1857-1861.
In the West, 1861-1866.
Innocents Abroad published, 1869.
Married Olivia Langdon, February 2, 1870.
Roughing It puWished, 1872.
Adventures of Tom Sawyer published, 1876.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published, 1884.
Failure of Webster & Company, 1894.
Wife died, June 5, 1904.
Degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford, 1907.
Died, Redding, Connecticut, April 21, 1910.

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
I
MARK TWAIN

When I was a boy of fourteen, Mark Twain took hold
of me as no other book had then and few have since. I
lay on the rug before the fire in the long winter eve
nings and my father read me "The Innocents Abroad"
and "Roughing It" and "Old Times on the Missis
sippi," and I laughed till I cried. Nor was it all
laughter. The criticism of life, strong and personal, if
crude, the frank, vivid comments on men and things,
set me thinking as I had never thought, and for several
years colored my maturing reflection in a way that
struck deep and lasted long.
Such is my youthful memory of Mark. For forty
years I read little of him. Now, leaping over that
considerable gulf, reading and re-reading old and new
together, to distil the essence of his soul in a brief
portrait, has been for me a wild revel, a riot of laughter
and criticism and prejudice and anti-prejudice and
revolt and rapture, from which it seems as if no sane
and reasoned judgment could ensue. Perhaps none has.
This much is clear, to start with, that Mark is not to
be defined or judged by the ordinary standards of mere
writers or literary men. He was something different,
3

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
perhaps somethmg bigger and deeper and more human,
at any rate something different. He did a vast amount
of hterary work and did it, if one may say so, in a
literary manner. He was capable of long, steady toil at
the desk. He wrote and rewrote, revised his copy over
and over again with patience and industry. He had the
writer's sense of living for the public, too, instinctively
made copy of his deepest personal emotions and ex
periences. One of his most striking productions is the
account of the death of his daughter, Jean; but no one
but a bom writer would have deliberately set down
such experiences at such a moment with pubUcation in
his thought. And he hked hterary glory. To be sure,
he sometimes denied this. In youth he wrote, "There
is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it
has no worth to me save in the way of business." ^
Again, he says in age, "Indifferent to nearly every
thing but work. I like that; I enjoy it, and stick to it.
I do it without purpose and without ambition; merely
for the love of it," » All the same, fame was sweet to
him. Yet one cannot think of him as a professional writer.
Rather, there is something of the bard about him, of
the old, epic, popular singer, who gathered up in him
self, ahnost unconsciously, the life and spirit of a whole
nation and poured it forth, more as a voice, an instru
ment, than as a deliberate artist. Consider the mass of
folk-lore in his best, his native books. Is it not just such
material as we find in the spontaneous, elementary
productions of an earher age?
Better still, perhaps, we should speak of him as a
4

MARK TWAIN
journalist; for a joumaUst he was essentially and
always, in his themes, in his gorgeous and unfaiUng
rhetoric, even in his attitude toward life. The journal
ist, when inspired and touched with genius, is the
nearest equivalent of the old epic singer, most embodies
the ideal of pouring out the hfe of his day and sur
roundings with as Uttle intrusion as possible of his own
personal, reflective consciousness.
And as Mark had the temperament to do this, so he
had the training. No man ever sprang more thoroughly
from the people or was better qualified to interpret the
people. Consider the nomadic irrelevance of his early
days, before his position was estabUshed, if it was ever
estabhshed. Born ui the Middle West toward the
middle of the century, he came into a moving world,
and he never ceased to be a moving spirit and to move
everybody about him. He tried printing as a business,
but any indoor business was too tame, even though
diversified by his thousand comic inventions. Piloting
on the vast meanders of the Mississippi was better.
What contacts he had there, with good and evil, with
joy and sorrow ! But even the Mississippi was not vast
enough for his uneasy soul. He roved the Far West,
tramped, traveled, mined, and speculated, was rich one
day and miserably poor the next; and all the time he
cursed and jested alternately and filled others with
laughter and amazement and affection and passed into
and out of theu- lives, like the shifting shadow of a
dream. Surely the fine of the old poet was made for
him, "Now clothed in feathers he on steeples walks."
5

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
And thus it was that he met his friend's challenge to
walk the city roofs, where they promenaded arm in arm,
until a policeman threatened to shoot, and was only
restrained by the explanatory outcry, "Don't shoot!
That's Mark Twain and Artemus Ward." *
This was his outer youthful life, and within it was
the same. For with some the feet wander while the soul
sits still. It was not so with him. Though all his life he
scolded himself for laziness, complained of his indo
lence, or gloried in it; yet when he was interested in
anything, his heart was one mad fury of energy. Listen
to his theory on the subject : " If I were a heathen, I
would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and
worship it ! I want a man to — I want you to — take
up a fine of action, and follow it out, in spite of the
very devil." * And practice for himself never fell short
of theory for others.
To be sure, his energy was too often at the mercy of
impulse. Where his fancies led him, there he followed,
with every ounce of force he had at the moment. What
might come afterwards he did not stop to think about
— until afterwards. Then there were sometimes bitter
regrets, which did not prevent a repetition of the proc
ess. He touches off the whole matter with his unfail
ing humor: "I still do the thing commanded by Cir
cumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.
Always violently. When I am reflecting on these
occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think." *
Perhaps the most amusing of all these spiritual
efforts and adventures of his youth were his dealings
with money. He was no born lover of money, and he
6

MARK TWAIN
was certainly no miser; but he liked what money
brings, and from his childhood he hated debt and
would not tolerate it. Therefore he was early and
always on the lookout for sources of gain and was often
shrewd in profiting by them. But what he loved most
of all was to take a chance. His sage advice on the
matter is : "There are two times in a man's life when he
should not speculate : when he can't afford it and when
he can." ^ Apparently his own life escaped from these
all-embracing conditions; for he speculated always. A
gold mine or a patent, an old farm or a new print
ing machine — all were ahke to him, vast regions of
splendid and unexplored possibility. And much as he
reveled in the realities of life, possibility was his natural
domain, gorgeous dreams and sunUt fancies, strange
realms of the imagination, where his youthful spirit
loved to wander and shape cloud futures that could
never come to pass, as he himself well knew, and knew
that to their unrealizable remoteness they owed the
whole of their charm.
But, you say, this was, after all, youthful. When
years came upon him, when he had tasted the sedate
soberness of hfe, dreams must have grown dim or been
forgotten. Far from it. His lovely wife called him
"Youth," till she died, and he deserved it. Though he
was married and a great author and had a dozen homes,
he never settled down, neither his feet nor his soul.
The spirit of his early ideal, "A hfe of don't-care-a-
damn in a boarding-house is what I have asked for in
many a secret prayer," ^ lingered with him always.
You see, he had restless nerves, to which long quiet and
7

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
sohtary, sombre reflection were a horror. And then he
had perfect, magnificent health, the kind that can
endure boarding-houses without ruin. "In no other
human being have I ever seen such physical endur
ance," says his biographer.* And Mark himself de
clared that he never knew what fatigue was. Who that
was made like this would not be glad to wander forever?
So Mark was most happy and most at home when he
was wandering.
He saw and liked to see all things and all men and
women. The touch of a human hand was pleasant to
him, and the sound of a human voice, speaking no
matter what lingo. He made friends of pilots and
pirates and miners and peasants and emperors and
clergymen, particularly clergymen, over whom he
apparently exercised such witchery that oaths from
him fell on their ears like prayers from other people.
No man ever more abused the human heart, or railed
more at the hoUowness of human affection, and no man
ever had more friends or loved more. To be sure, he
could hate, with humorous frenzy and apparently with
persistence. But love in the main prevailed and, indeed,
what anchored his wandering footsteps was not places
but souls, was love and tenderness. He had plenty for
the pilots and the pirates and the clergymen. He had
much more for those who were nearest him. His
infinite devotion to his daughters, most of all to his
wife, who was fully worthy of it and who understood
and brought out the best in him and tolerated what
was not so good, is not the least among the things that
make him lovable. 8

MARK TWAIN
As he was a creature of contradictions, it is no sur
prise to find that, while he prayed for boarding-houses,
he loved comfort and even luxury. He would have eaten
off a plank in a mining-camp, and slept on one; but the
softest beds and the richest tables were never unwel
come, and one attraction of wandering was to see how
comfortable men can be as well as how uncomfortable.
Now, to have luxury, you must have money. And
Mark, in age as in youth, always wanted money,
whether from mines in Nevada, or from huge books
sold by huge subscription, or from strange and surpris
ing inventions that were bound to revolutionize the
worlds and bring in multimiUions. He always wanted
money, though rivers of it ran m to him — and ran out
again. He spent it, he gave it away, he never had it, he
always wanted it.
And always, tiU death, his soul wandered even more
than his body did. And his adventures with money
were mainly matters of dream, even when the dreams
were punctuated with sharp material bumps. Again
and again some exciting speculation appealed to him,
as much for its excitement as for its profit. He built
great cloud castles and wandered in them and bade his
friends admire them and made colossal calculations of
enormous successes. Then the clouds collapsed and
vanished and the flaw in the calculations became
apparent — too late. Calculations were never a strong
point with him, whether of assets or Uabilities. He
spent a white night working over the latter: "When I
came down in the morning a gray and aged wreck, and
went over the figures again, I found that in some
9

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
unaccountable way I had multipUed the totals by 2.
By God, I dropped 75 years on the floor where I
stood." 9
Even his loves had an element of dream in them, and
surely dream made up a large portion of his hatred.
Certain natures offended him, exasperated him, and he
amused himself with furious assertion of how he would
like to torment them. If he had seen one of them suffer,
even in a finger's end, he would have done all in his
power to reUeve it. But in the abstract how he did
luxuriate in abuse of these imaginary enemies, what
splendor of new-coined damnation he lavished on them,
and all a matter of dreams !
Something of dream entered also into his widespread
glory; for such wealth of praise and admiration has
surely not often fallen upon walkers of the firm-set
earth. During the first decade of the twentieth century
he drifted in his white dream garments — as Emily
Dickinson did in soUtude — through dream crowds
who applauded him and looked up to him and loved
him. And he ridiculed it, turned it inside out to show
the fuU dream lining, and enjoyed it, enjoyed his vast
successes on the pubUc platform, enjoyed the thronging
tributes of epistolary admirers, enjoyed the many
hands that touched his in loving and grateful tender
ness. And at the end, to make the dream complete, as if it
were the conception of a poet, a fuU, rounded, perfect
tragedy, misfortunes and disasters piled in upon the
dream glory and thwarted and blighted it, even while
their depth of gloom seemed to make its splendor more
10

MARK TWAIN
imposing. Money, which had all along seduced him,
betrayed him, for a time at any rate, and he waUowed
in the distress of bankruptcy, tiU he made his own
shoulders Uft the burden. One of his daughters, who
was very dear to him, died when he was far away from
her. His wife died and took happiness with her and
made all glory seem like sordid folly. His youngest
daughter died suddenly, tragicaUy. What was there
left? Nothing. Toys, trifles, snatched moments of obliv
ion, bilUards, bUUards, tiU midnight, then a Uttle
troubled sleep, and more bilUards tfll the end. In
perhaps the most beautiful words he ever wrote he
summed up the fading quality of it aU under this very
figure of a dream: "Old Age, white-headed, the temple
empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves,
nothing but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-
end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously
dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left
but You, centre of a snowy desolation, perched on the
ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek
and asking Yourself, 'Would you do it again if you had
the chance?'" " II
Mark Twain is generally known to the world as a
laugher. His seriousness, his pathos, his romance, his
instinct for adventure, are aU acknowledged and en
joyed. Still, the mention of his name ahnost always
brings a smile first. So did the sight of him.
There is no doubt that he found the imiverse laugh-
11

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
able and made it so. The ultimate test of the laughing
instinct is that a man should be ahvays ready to laugh
at himself. Mark was. The strange chances of his Ufe,
its ups and downs, its pitiful disasters, sometimes
made him weep, often made him swear. But at a touch
they could always make him laugh. "There were few
things that did not amuse him," writes his biographer,
"and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener,
than himself." ^^ One brief sentence sums up what he
was never tired of repeating, "I have been an author
for 20 years and an ass for 55." " And he not only saw
laughter when it came to hun. He went to seek it. He
was always fond of jests and fantastic tricks, made
mirth out of solemn things and solemn people, stood
ready, like the clown of the circus, to crack his whip
and bid the world dance after him in quaint freaks of
jollity, aU the more diverting when staid souls and
mirthless visages played a chief part in the furious
revel. On the strength of this constant sense and love of
laughter many have maintained that Mark was one of
the great world humorists, that he ranks with Cer
vantes and Sterne and the Shakespeare of "As You
Like It" and "Twelfth Night," as one who was an
essential exponent of the comic spirit. With this view
I cannot wholly agree. It is true that Mark could find
the laughable element in everything, true also that he
had that keen sense of melancholy which is inseparable
from the richest comedy. Few have expressed this
more intensely than he has: "Everything human is
pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy,
12

MARK TWAIN
but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." " Yet the
very extravagance of expression here suggests my
difficulty. Somehow in Mark the humor and the pathos
are not essentially blended. The laughter is wild and
exuberant as heart can desire. But it does not really go
to the bottom of things. Serious matters, so-called
serious matters, are taken too seriously; and under the
laughter there is a haunting basis of wrath and bitter
ness and despair.
To elucidate this it is necessary to examine and
follow the process and progress of Mark's thinking. In
early years, as he himself admits, he thought Uttle,
that is, abstractly. His mind was active enough, busy
enough, and, as we have seen, his fancy was always
full of dreams. But he let the great problems alone, did
not analyze, did not philosophize, content to extract
immense joviaUty from the careless surface of life and
not probe further. Even the analysis of laughter itself
did not tempt him. In this he was probably wise and he
maintained the attitude always. "Humor is a subject
which has never had much interest for me." " Indeed,
the analysis of humor may be safely left to those gray
persons who do not know what it is. But much of the
jesting of Mark's youthful days is so trivial that it
distinctly unpUes the absence of steady thinking on
any subject. Not that he was indifferent to practical
seriousness. Wrong, injustice, cruelty, could always
set him on fire in a moment. There was no folly about
his treatment of these. But at that stage his serious
ness was busy with effects rather than with causes.
Then he acquired money and leisure and began to
13

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
reflect upon the nature of things. This late dawning of
his speculative turn must always be remembered in
considering the quality of it. It accounts for the singu
lar gaps in his information about simple matters, for
the impression of terrific but not very well-guided
energy which comes from his intellectual effort. It
accounts for the sense of surprise and novelty in his
spuitual attitude, which Howells so justly pointed
out. 1^ He seems always like a man discovering things
which are perfectly weU known to trained thinkers, and
this gives an extraordinary freshness and spirit to his
pronouncements on all speculative topics.
When he became aware of his reasoning powers, he
delighted in them. His shrewd little daughter said of
him, "He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I
think." " He was a philosopher by inclination, at any
rate. He loved to worry the universe, as a kitten
worries a ball of yarn. Perhaps this seemed to make up
in a small way for the worries the universe had given
him. He loved to argue and discuss and dispute and
confute, and then to spread over all bitterness the
charm of his inextinguishable laughter. His oaths and
jests and epigrams convulsed his interlocutors, if they
did not convince them.
As to his theoretical conclusions, it may be said that
they were in the main nihilistic. But before considering
them more particularly, it must be insisted and em
phasized that they were theoretical and did not affect
his practical morals. Few human beings ever lived who
had a nicer conscience and a finer and more delicate
fulfihnent of duty. It is true that all his life he kept up
14

MARK TWAIN
a constant humorous depreciation of himself in this
regard. If you Ustened to his own confessions, you
would think hun the greatest liar in existence and
conclude that his moral depravation was only equaled
by his intellectual nulUty. This method is often effec
tive for hiding and excusing small defects and delin
quencies. But Mark needed no such excuse. What
faiUngs there were in his moral character were those
mcident to humanity. As an individual he stood with
the best.
The most obvious instances of his rectitude are in
regard to money. In spite of his dreams and specu
lative vagaries, he was punctiliously scrupulous in
financial relations, his strictness cuhninating in the vast
effort of patience and self-denial necessary to pay off
the debt of honor which fell upon him in his later years.
But the niceness of his conscience was not limited to
broad obligations of this kind. "Mine was a trained
Presbyterian conscience," he says, "and knew but the
one duty — to hunt and harry its slave upon all pre
texts and aU occasions." " He might trifle, he might
quibble, he might jest; but no one was more anxious to
do what was fair and right, even to the point of over
doing it. "I don't wish even to seem to do anything
which can invite suspicion," he said, as to a matter so
trivial as taking advantage in a game. i«
And the moral sense was not confined to practical
matters of conduct. Human tenderness and kindliness
and sympathy have rarely been more highly developed
than in this man who questioned theu existence. The
finest touch in all his writings is the cry of Huck Finn
15

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
when, after a passionate struggle between his duty to
society and his duty to friendship, he tears the paper in
which he proposed to surrender the nigger, Jim, and
exclaims, "All right, then, I 'U go to hell." ^' And Mark
hunself would have been perfectly capable, not only of
saying he would go, but of going.
As he loved men,'so he trusted them. In the abstract,
judging from hunself, he declared they were monsters
of selfishness, greedy, deceitful, treacherous, thought
ful in aU things of their own profit and advantage. In
the individual, again judging from himself, he accepted
them at their face value, as kindly, self-sacrificing,
ready to beUeve, ready to love, ready to help. Being
himself an extreme example, both in sceptical analysis
and in human instinct, he often fell into error and
trusted where there was no foundation to build on.
In consequence his actual experience went far to
justify his sceptical theories, and he presents another
instance, like Byron, like Leopardi, of a man whose
standard of Ufe is so high, who expects so much of him
self and of others, that the reality perpetually fails him,
and excess of optimism drives him to excess of pessi
mism. For example, his interesting idealization or
idolatry of Joan of Arc, his beUef that she actually
existed as a miracle of nature, makes it comprehensible
that he should find ordinary men and women faulty
and contemptible enough compared with such a type.
It is not the place here to analyze Mark's speculative
conclusions in detail. They may be found theoretically
elaborated in "What is Man?", practically applied in
"The Mysterious Stranger" and the "Maxims of
16

MARK TWAIN
Pudd'nhead Wilson," and artistically illustrated m
"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and innu
merable other stories. They may be stimmed up as a
soul-less and blasting development of crude evolution
ary materiaUsm, as manifested in the teachmgs of
Robert IngersoU. Man's freedom disappears, his
moraUty becomes enlightened selfishness, his soul is
dissipated into thin air, his future Ufe grows so dubious
as to be disregarded, and the thought of death is only
tolerable because Ufe is not. The deity, in any sense of
value to humanity, is quite disposed of; or, if he is left
lurking m an odd comer of the universe, it is with such
complete discredit that one can only remember the
sarcasm of the witty Frenchman: "The highest com
pliment we can pay God is not to believe in him."
In all this perpetually recurrent fierce dissection of
the divine and human, one is constantly impressed by
the vigor and independence of the thinking. The man
makes his own views; or since, as he himself repeatedly
insists, no one does this, at least he makes them over,
rethinks them, gives them a cast, a touch that stamps
them Mark Twain's and no one else's, and, as such,
significant for the study of his character, if for nothing
more. On the other hand, if the thinking is fresh and vig
orous, one is also impressed and distressed by its nar
rowness and dogmatism. Here again the man's in
dividuality shows in ample, humorous recognition of
his own weakness, or excess of strength. No one has
ever admitted with more delightful candor the en
croaching passion of a preconceived theory. I have got
17

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
a philosophy of life, he says, and the rest of my days
will be spent in patching it up and " in looking the other
way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact
approaches." ^° Nevertheless, the impression of dog
matism remains, or, let us say better, of lunitation.
The thinking is acute, but it does not go to the bottom
of things. The fundamental, dissolving influence of
the idealistic philosophy, for instance, is not once
suggested or comprehended. This shows nowhere more
fully than in the discussion of Christian Science. Ev
erything is shrewd, apt, brilUant, but wholly on the
surface. The effect of the bitter and withering character of
Mark's thought on his own life was much emphasized
by the lack of the great and sure spiritual resources
that are an unfailing refuge to some of us. He could not
transport himself into the past. When he attempted it,
he carried all the battles and problems of to-day along
with him, as in the "Yankee at the Court of King
Arthur." He had not the historical feeling in its richest
sense. Art, also, in all its deeper manifestations, was
hidden from him. He could not acquire a love for
classical painting or music, and revenged himself for
his lack of such enjoyment by railing at those who had
it. Even Nature did not touch great depths in him,
because they were not there. He reveled in her more
theatrical aspects, sunsets, ice-storms. Her energy
stunulated a strange excitement in him, shown in
Twitchell's account of his rapture over a mountain
brook. 21 I do not find that he felt the charm of lonely
walks in country solitude. 18

MARK TWAIN
It is on this lack of depth in thinking and feeling that
I base my reluctance to class Mark with the greatest
comic writers of the world. His thought was bitter
because it was shallow; it did not go deep enough to
get the humble tolerance, the vast self-distmst that
should go with a dissolving vision of the foundations of
the individual universe. His writing alternates from
the violence of unmeaning laughter to the harshness of
satire that has no laughter in it. In this he resembles
Moliere, whose Scapins are as far from reflection as are
his Tartuffes from gayety. And Mark's place is rather
with the bitter satirists, Moliere, Ben Jonson, Swift,
than with the great, broad, sunshiny laughers. Lamb,
Cervantes, and the golden comedy of Shakespeare.
Indeed, no one word indicates better the lack I mean
in Mark than "sunshine." You may praise his work in
many ways; but could any one ever call it merry? He
can give you at aU times a riotous outburst of convuls
ing cachinnation. He cannot give you merriment,
sunshine, pure and lasting joy. And these are always
the enduring elements of the highest comedy.
Ill
But perhaps this is to consider too curiously. The
vast and varied total of Mark's works affords other
elements of interest besides the analysis of speculative
thought, or even of laughter. Above all, we Americans
should appreciate how thoroughly American he is. To
be sure, in the huge mixture of stocks and races that
surrounds us, it seems absurd to pick out anything or
anybody as typically American. Yet we do it. We all
19

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
choose FrankUn as the American of the eighteenth
century and Lincoln as the American of the nineteenth.
And most will agree that Mark was as American as
either of these.
He was American in appearance. The thin, agile,
mobile figure, with its undulating ease in superficial
awkwardness, suggested worlds of humorous sensibility.
The subtle, wrinkled face, under its rich shock of hair,
first red, then snowy white, had endless possibilities of
sympathetic response. It was a face that expressed,
repressed, impressed every variety of emotion known
to its owner.
He was American in all his defects and limitations.
The large tolerance, cut short with a most definite end
when it reached the bounds of its comprehension, was
eminently American. The slight flavor of vanity, at
least of self-complacent satisfaction, the pleasant and
open desire to fill a place in the world, whether by
mounting a platform at just the right moment or
wearing staring white clothes in pubUc places, we may
call American with sUght emphasis, as well as human.
But these weaknesses were intimately associated
with a very American excellence, the supreme candor,
the laughing frankness which recognized them always.
Assuredly no human being ever more abounded in such
candor than Mark Twain. He confessed at aU times,
with the superabundance of diction that was bom with
him, all his enjoyment, all his suffering, all his sin, all
his hope, aU his despair.
And he was American in another delightful thing,
his quickness and readiness of sympathy, his singular
20

MARK TWAIN
gentleness and tenderness. He could lash out with his
tongue and tear anything and anybody to pieces. He
could not have done bodily harm to a fly, unless a
larger pity caUed for it. He was supremely modest and
simple in his demands upon others, supremely deprecia-
tive of the many things he did for them. "I wonder
why they all go to so much trouble for me. I never go
to any trouble for anybody." " The quiet wistfulness
of it, when you know him, brings tears.
Above all, he was American in his thorough democ
racy. He had a pitiful distrust of man; but his belief in
men, aU men, was as boundless as his love for them.
Though he lived much with the rich and lofty, he was
always perfectly at home with the simple and the poor,
understood their thoughts, liked their ways, and made
them feel that he had been simple and poor himself and
might be so again.
He was not only democratic in feeling and spirit, he
was democratic in authorship, both in theory and
practice. Hundreds of authors have been obliged to
write for the ignorant many, for the excellent reason
that the cultivated few would not listen to them. Per
haps not one of these hundreds has so deliberately
avowed his purpose of neglecting the few to address
the many, as Mark did. The long letter to Mr. Andrew
Lang, in which he proclaims this intention, is a curious
document. Let others aim high, he says, let others
exhaust themselves in restless and usually vain at
tempts to please fastidious critics. I write for the
milUon, I want to please them, I know how to do it, I
have done it. "I have never tried, in even one smgle
21

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. . . .
I never had any ambition in that duection, but always
hunted for bigger game — the masses. I have seldom
deliberately tried to instmct them, but have done my
best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would
have satisfied my dearest ambition at any tune." ^^
It is hardly necessary to dweU upon the weak points
in this theory. Whatever Mark, or any one else pro
fesses, it cannot be questioned that he would prefer the
approbation of the cultured few, if he could get it.
Moreover, it may easily be maintained that the many
in most cases take their taste from the few; and if this
does not hold with a writer's contemporaries, it is
unfailing with posterity. If a writer is to please the
generations that follow him, he can do it only by secur
ing the praise of those who by taste and cultivation are
qualified to judge. In other words, if Mark's works
endure, it will be because he appealed to the few as weU
as to the many.
However this may be, there can be no question that
Mark reached the great democratic public of his own
day and held it. To be sure, it is doubtful whether even
he attained the full glory of what he and Stevenson
agreed to call submerged authorship,** the vast accept
ance of those who are wept over at lone midnight by
the shop-girl and the serving-maid. But his best-
known books, "Tom Sawyer," "Huck Finn," "Life
on the Mississippi," "The Prince and the Pauper,"
may be justly said to belong to the literature of Ameri
can democracy, and the travel books and many others
are not far behind these, 22

MARK TWAIN
With this deliberate intention to appeal to the masses
and to affect the masses, it becomes an essential part of
the study of Mark's career and character to consider
what his influence upon the masses was. He talked to
them aU his life, from the platform and from the
printed page, with his sympathetic, human voice, his
insinuating smile. What did his talk mean to them,
how did it affect them, for good or for evfl?
In the first place, beyond a doubt, enormously for
good. Laughter in itself is an immense blessing to
the weary soul, not a disputable blessing, like too
much teaching and preaching, but a positive benefit.
"Amusement is a good preparation for study and a
good healer of fatigue after it," says Mark himself. **
And amusement he provided, in vast abundance,
muscle-easing, spirit-easing.
Also, he did more than make men laugh; he made
them think, on practical, moral questions. He used his
terrible weapon of satire to demolish meanness, greed,
pettiness, dishonesty. He may have believed in the
abstract that selfishness was the root of human action,
but he scourged it in concrete cases with whips of
scorpions. He may have beUeved in the abstract that
men were unfit to govern themselves, but he threw the
bitterest scorn on those who attempted to tyrannize
over others.
Finally, Mark's admirers insist, and insist with
justice, that he was a splendid agent in the overthrow
of shams. He loved tmth, sincerity, the simple recog
nition of facts as they stand, no matter how homely,
and with all his soul he detested cant of aU kinds. "His
23

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
tmth and his honor, his love of tmth, and his love of
honor, overflow all boundaries," says Mr. BirreU, "he
has made the world better by his presence." ^^ From
this point of view the praise was fully deserved.
Yet it is just here that we come upon the weakness.
And if Mark made the world better, he also made it
worse; at any rate, many individuals in it. For, with
the wholesale destruction of shams, went, as so often,
the destruction of reverence, "that angel of the world,"
as Shakespeare calls it. When Mark had fairly- got
through with the shams, the trouble was that there was
nothing left. One of his enthusiastic admirers compares
him to Voltaire, The comparison is interesting and
suggestive. Voltaire, too, was an enormous power in
his day. He wrote for the multitude, so far as it was
then possible to do it. He wielded splendid weapons of
sarcasm and satire. He was always a destroyer of
shams, smashed superstition and danced upon the
remains of it. But Voltaire was essentially an optimist
and believed in and enjoyed many things. He be
lieved in literature, he believed in glory, above all he
believed in himself. When Mark had stripped from
life all the illusions that remained even to Voltaire,
there was nothing left but a bare, naked, ugly, hideous
corpse, amiable only in that it was a corpse, or finally
would be.
Mark himself frequently recognizes this charge of
being a demolisher of reverence and tries to rebut it. I
never assault real reverence, he says. To pretend to
revere things because others revere them, or say they
do, to cherish established superstitions of art, or of
24

MARK TWAIN
morals, or of religion, is to betray and to deceive and to
corrupt. But I never mock those things that I really
revere myself. All other reverence is humbug. And
one is driven to ask, What does he really revere him
self? His instinctive reverence for humanity in individ
ual cases is doubtless delicate and exquisite. But in
theory he tears the veil from God and man alike.
To iUustrate, I need only quote two deliberate and
well-weighed statements o| his riper years. How could
you wither man more terribly than in the following?
"A myriad of men are bom; they labor and sweat and
stmggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight;
they scramble for little mean advantages over each
other; age creeps upon them; infirmities foUow; shames
and humiliations bring down their prides and their
vanities; those they love are taken from them and the
joy of Ufe is turned to aching grief. The burden of
pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year; at
length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead;
longing for release is in their place. It comes at last —
the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them —
and they vanish from a world where they were of no
consequence, where they have achieved nothing, where
they were a mistake and a failure and a fooUshness;
where they have left no sign that they have existed — a
world which wiU lament them a day and forget them
forever," "
For those who thus envisaged man there used to be a
refuge with God, Not so for Mark, Man deserves pity.
God, at least any God who might have been a refuge,
deserves nothing but horror and contempt. The criti-
25

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
cism is, to be sure, put into the mouth of Satan; but
Satan would have been shocked at it: he was not so far
advanced as Mark: "A God who could make good
children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad
ones; who could have made every one of them happy,
yet never made a single happy one , . - who mouths jus
tice and invented hell — mouths mercy and invented
hell — mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multipUed
by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths
morals to other people and has none himself; who
frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created
man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the re
sponsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honor
ably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and
finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this
poor, abused slave to worship him!" "
Can it be considered that doctrines such as this are
Ukely to be beneficial to the average ignorant reader of
democracy, or that the preacher of them made the
world wholly better by his presence? It is true that
they do not appear so openly in Mark's best-known
books, true that the practical manliness and generosity
of Tom and Huck largely eclipse them. Yet the fierce
pessimism of Pudd'nhead Wilson stares at the reader
from the popular story of that name and from the
equally popular "Following the Equator," and even in
the history of Tom and Huck the hand that slashes
reverence is never far away.
The charge of evil influence fretted Mark as much as
that of irreverence. He defends himself by denying
that there is such a thing as personal influence from
26

MARK TWAIN
doctrines. Our happiness and unhappiness, he says,
come from our temperament, not from our belief, which
does not affect them in the slightest. This is, of course,
an exaggeration, as the story of Mark's own life shows.
I have already pointed out that in his case lack of
belief did not mean lack of morals; but it does in many
cases and lack of happiness in many more. One can
perhaps best speak for one's self. It took years to
shake off the withering blight which Mark's satire cast
for me over the whole art of Europe. For years he
spoiled for me some of the greatest sources of relief and
joy. How many never shake off that blight at all!
And again, in going back to him to write this portrait,
I found the same portentous, shadowing darkness
stealing over me that he had spread before, I Uved for
ten years with the soul of Robert E, Lee and it really
made a little better man of me. Six months of Mark
Twain made me a worse. I even caught his haunting
exaggeration of profanity. And I am fifty-six years old
and not over-susceptible to infection. What can he not
do to children of sixteen?
It is precisely his irresistible personal charm that
makes his influence overwhehning. You hate Voltaire,
you love Mark. In later years a lady called upon him
to express her enthusiasm. She wanted to kiss his hand.
Imagine the humor of the situation — for Mark. But
he accepted it with perfect dignity and perfect tender
seriousness, "How God must love you 1" said the lady,
" I hope so," said Mark gently. After she had gone, he
observed as gently and without a smile, " I guess she
has n't heard of our strained relations." " Who could
27

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
help being overcome by such a man and disbelieving all
he disbelieved? When he clasps your hand and lays his
arm over your shoulder and whispers that life is a
wretched, pitiable thing, and effort useless, and hope
worthless, how are you to resist him?
So my final, total impression of Mark is desolating.
If his admirers rebel, declare this utterly false, and
insist that the final impression is laughter, they should
remember that it is they and especially Mark himself
who are perpetually urging us to take him seriously.
Taken seriously, he is desolating. I cannot escape the
image of a person groping in the dark, with his hands
blindly stretched before him, ignorant of whence he
comes and whither he is going, yet with it aU suddenly
bursting out into peals of laughter, which, in such a
situation, have the oddest and most painful effect.
Yet, whatever view you take of him, if you Uve with
him long, he possesses you and obsesses you; for he was
a big man and he had a big heart.

II
HENRY ADAMS

CHRONOLOGY
Henry Adams.
Born, Boston, Massachusetts, February 16, 1838. .
Graduated at Harvard, 1858.
Private Secretary to his father in England, 1861-1868,
Assistant Professor at Harvard, 1870-1877.
Editor of the North American Review, 1870-1876.
Married Marion Hooper, June 27, 1872.
Wife died. December 6, 1885.
History of United States published, 1889-1891.
Education of Henry Adams privately printed, 1906.
Died, Washington, March 27, 1918.

-i^V

HENRY ADAMS

II
HENRY ADAMS
I
In one of the most briUiant, subtle, and suggestive
autobiographies ever written, Henry Adams informs us
that he was never educated and endeavors to explain
why his varied attempts at education were abortive.
He flings a trumpet challenge to the universe: Here am
I, Henry Adams. I defy you to educate me. You can
not do it. Apparently, by his own reiterated and tri
umphant declaration, the universe, after the most
humiUating efforts, could not.
We should perhaps sympathize with the universe
more perfectly, since Adams asks no sympathy, if, at
the beginning of his narrative, or even in the middle of
it, he told us what he means by education. This he
never does with any completeness, though the word
occurs probably as many times as there are pages in
the book. When he has advanced more than halfway
through his story, he remarks casually that, for a mind
worth educating, the object of education "should be
the teaching itself how to react with vigor and econ
omy." ^ This is excellent, so far as it goes; but it is
rather vague; it hardly seems to bear upon many of
the attempted methods of education, and it does not
reappear in any proportion to the demands upon it. I
cannot help thinking that if in the beginnmg the bril-
31

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Uant autobiographer had set himself sincerely and
soberly to reflect upon the word he was to use so often,
he would have saved himself much repetition and the
universe some anxiety, though he would have deprived
his readers of a vast deai of entertainment. As it is, he
pursues an illusory phantom through a world of inter
esting experiences. Probably a dozen times in the
course of the book he teUs us that Adams's education
was ended. But a few pages later the delightful task is
taken up again, until one comes to see that to have
been educated, really and finally, would have been the
tragedy of his life.
At any rate, nobody could furnish a prettier keynote
for a portrait than the motto, "always in search of
education." ' Let us follow the search through all
its meanders of intellectual and spiritual experience.
From birth in Boston in 1838 to death in Washington
in 1918, through America, Europe, and the rest of the
world, through teaching and authorship and politics
and diplomacy, through love and friendship and the
widest social contact, the curious and subtle soul, with
or without the afterthought of education, pursued its
complicated course, scattering showers of brilliancy
about it, leaving memories of affection behind it, and
however difficult to grasp in its passage and elusive in
its product, always and everywhere unfailingly inter
esting. It is hardly necessary to say that, with this restless
and unsatisfied spirit the period which sees education
finished for most men did not even see it begun. The
infant who starts with the definition of a teacher as "a
32

HENRY ADAMS
man employed to tell Ues to little boys" ' is not very
Ukely to get large results from early schooling. The
juvenile Adams surveyed Boston and Quincy and
found them distmctly wanting, in his eyes, though not
in their own. "Boston had solved the universe; or had
offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The
problem was worked out." * But not for him.
With Harvard CoUege the results were little better.
He fully understood that, if social position counted, he
ought to get all there was to be got. "Of money he
[Adams, for the autobiography is sustained throughout
in the third person] had not much, of mind not more,
but he could be quite certain that, barring his own
faults, his social position would never be questioned." *
He was ready to admit also that failure, so far as there
was failure, was owing precisely to faults of his own.
"Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom
what the boy disliked most was any school at aU. He
did not want to be one in a hundred — one per cent of
an education." " Furthermore, with the wiUingness we
all have to acknowledge weaknesses we should not wish
others to find in us, he declares that "he had not wit or
scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a
rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges were
right," ^ But, at any rate. Harvard did not educate
him. There was no cooperation, no coordination.
Everybody stood alone, if not apart. "It seemed a
sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when
one has no passions; still easier when one has no
pains." * And the total outcome was forlornly iaade-
quate: "Socially or inteUectually, the college was for
33

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
him negative and in some ways mischievous. The most
tolerant man of the world could not see good in the
lower habits of the students, but the vices were less
harmful than the virtues," '
Nobody nowadays would anticipate that Germany
could do what Harvard could not. But some persons
then cherished amiable delusions. Young Adams
hoped vaguely that Germany might educate hun.
With turns of phrase that recall Mark Twain he recog
nizes his happy moral fitness for education — if he
could get it. "He seemed well behaved, when any one
was looking at him; he observed conventions, when he
could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome,
towards a superior; his morals were apparently good,
and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known
to be bad." i«
On this admirable substmcture even Germany,
however, could not erect the desued edifice. Acting on
the pompous encouragement of Sumner, who said to
him, " I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the
language; and three months later when I went away,
I talked it to my cabman," " he struggled with the
difficulties of the German tongue and overcame them
by methods of which he says that "three months
passed in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to
talk with a cabman." " But to one so exacting, the
mere learning of a language was not education, though
it seems so to some people. The question was, what
you did with the language after you learned it. And
here Germany failed as egregiously as Boston, From
careful personal contact, Adams concluded that the
34

HENRY ADAMS
education in the public schools was hopeless. The
memory was made sodden and soggy by enormous
burdens. "No other faculty than the memory seemed j
to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of
reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The
German government did not encourage reasoning." ^*
The boys' bodies were disordered by bad air and ill-
adjusted exercise, and then "they were required to
prepare daUy lessons that would have quickly broken
down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they
could learn only because their minds were morbid." "
It was hardly Ukely that the university teaching would
produce a more favorable impression. It did not.
"The professor mumbled his comments; the students
made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have
learned from books or discussion in a day more than
they could learn from him in a month, but they must
pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if
they wanted a degree. To an American the result was
worthless." " When the time came for leavmg Ger
many, our student departed with a light heart and a
firm resolution that, "wherever else he might, in the
infinities of space and time, seek for education, it
should not be again in BerUn." "
Many earnest persons who have found direct educa
tion for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare
that they first began to learn when they began to teach
and that in the education of others they discovered the
secret of their own. After a number of years of varied
activity, Adams returned to Harvard as a teacher and
had an opportunity to test the tmth of this principle.
35

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Viewed objectively, his work in instmcting others
seems universally commended. His pupils praised hun,
admired him, cherished a warm personal affection for
hun. He did not try to burden their memories, or to
fiU them with any theories or doctrines of his own. He
made them think, he put Ufe into them, inteUectual
life, spiritual life. " In what way Mr. Adams aroused
my slumbering faculties, I am at a loss to say," writes
Mr. Lodge; "but there can be no doubt of the fact." "
What greater function or service can a teacher perform
than this?
But for the educator himself teaching was no more
profitable than learning. He had a keen sense of the
responsibilities of his task. "A parent gives Ufe, but as
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his
deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can
never tell where his influence stops." " He knew his
own vast ignorance, as his pupils did not know theirs.
"His course had led him through oceans of ignorance;
he had tumbled from one ocean into another." i* But
the diffusion of ignorance, even conscientious, did not
seem to him an object worth toiling for. Education, as
admuiistered at Harvard and at similar institutions,
appeared to lead nowhere. The methods were wrong,
the aims were wrong, if there were any aims. That it
educated scholars was very doubtful; that it did not
educate teachers was certain. "Thus it turned out
that, of all his many educations, Adams thought that
of school-teacher the thinnest." 2"
And how was it with society, with the wide and
varied contact with men and women? If ever man had
36

HENRY ADAMS
the chance to be educated by this means, Henry Adams
was the man. He met aU sorts of people in aU sorts of
places, met them intimately, not only at balls and din
ners, but in unguarded hours around the domestic
hearth. As with the teaching, others' impression of him
is enthusiastic. He was not perhaps the best of "mix
ers" in the American sense, was shy and retiring in any
general company; but he was kindly, gracious, sympa
thetic, full of response, full of stimulation, full of spar-
kUng and not domineering wit. When he and Mrs.
Adams kept open house in Washington, it was weU said
of them : "Nowhere in the United States was there then,
or has there since been, such a salon as theirs. Sooner
or later, everybody who possessed real quality crossed
the threshold of 1603 H Street." ^i And again, "To his
intimates — and these included women of wit and
charm and distinction — the hours spent in his study
or at his table were the best that Washington could
give." ^'
But, as with the teaching, the man's own view of his
general human relations is less satisfactory. The play
of motives is interesting, certainly; but what can he
learn from it, what can it do for his education? "All
that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of
his own ignorance." ^' The great obstacle for sensitive
natures to all social pleasure, the immense intmsion of
one's self, was always present to him, never entirely got
rid of. "His Uttle mistakes in etiquette or address
made him writhe with torture." " And of one concrete,
tormenting incident he says, "This might seem humor
ous to some, but to him the world turned ashes." ** The
37

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
annoyances were great and the compensations trifling.
Though he touched many hands, heard many voices,
looked deep into many eyes, he drifted through the
world in a dream solitude. When he was in Cambridge,
he bewailed the isolation of professors. "All these bril
liant men were greedy for companionship, all were
famished for want of it." ^8 But the greed and the want
haunted hun everywhere. I do not see that they were
ever satisfied.
With women he fared somewhat better than with
men, and few men have been more frank about ac
knowledging their debt to the other sex. " In after life
he made a general law of experience — no woman had
ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him
right." ^'' And at all times and on all occasions he paid
his debt with abundance of praise, tempered, of course,
with such reserve as was to be expected from one who
had aU his life been seeking education and had not
found it. To be sure, he readily admits entire ignorance
as to the character, motives, and purposes of woman
kind. "The study of history is useful to the historian
by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass
of this ignorance crushes one who is famiUar enough
with what are called historical sources to realize how
few women have ever been known." "^ But such admis
sion of ignorance, especially for one who triumphed in
ignorance on all subjects, only made it easier to recog
nize and celebrate the charm. One could trifle with the
ignorance perpetually, elaborate it and compUcate it,
tiU it took the form of the most exquisite comprehen
sion. "The proper study of mankind is woman and, by
38

HENRY ADAMS
common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the
most complex and arduous." **
Was it a question of the woman of America? One
could write novels, like "Esther" and "Democracy,"
in which the woman of America is made a miracle of
cleverness and is at any rate more real than anything
else. Or, in intimate table-talk with great statesmen
and their wives, one could calmly insist that "the
American man is a failure: You are all failures. . . .
Would n't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against
Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance
if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? " '« But unquestion
ably one treads safer ground and is less exposed to the
temptation of irony, if one goes back five hundred years
and adores the Virgin of Chartres. With her, as Mark
Twain found with Joan of Arc, one can elevate the fem
inine ideal to a Gothic sublimity without too inconven
ient intrusion of harsh daylight.
When we reduce these abstract personal contacts to
concrete individuality, we find, or divine, Adams at his
best, at his most human. "Friends are born, not made,
and Henry never mistook a friend." *^ For all his vast
acquaintance, these friendships were not many, and
they seem to have been deep and tme and lasting. To
be sure, he complains that politics are a dangerous dis
solvent here as elsewhere. "A friend in power is a
friend lost." " But his love for Hay and for Clarence
King, not to speak of others, was evidently an immense
element in his emotional life, and if they did not give
hun education, they did what was even more difficult
and vastly better, made him forget it. Moreover, as is
39

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
indicated in Mrs. La Farge's charming study of her
uncle, there was a pecuUar tenderness m Adams's in
timate personal relations, very subtle, very elusive,
very delicate, but very pervading. As is the case with
many shy and self-contained natures, this tendemess
showed most in his contact with the young. ^* But he
had, further, a pecuUar gift of eliciting by his imagina
tive sympathy, affectionate confidences from young
and old."
To what we may assume to have been the deepest
love of all Adams himself makes not the faintest refer
ence. His wooing and marriage are not once mentioned
in the autobiography, but are lost in the shadowy
twenty years which he passes over with a word. Some
dream attachments of early childhood are touched with
delicate sarcasm. Beyond this, love as a personal mat
ter does not enter into his wide analysis. From the
comments of others we infer that, although he had no
children, his marriage gave hun as much as any human
relation can and more than most marriages do, while
his wife's death brought him deep and abiding sorrow.
But we may safely conclude that marriage did not give
him that mysterious will-o'-the wisp, education, since,
after Mrs. Adams's death, we find him seeking it as
restlessly and as unprofitably as ever.
So, having traced his~ search through the compUcated
phases of the more personal side of Ufe, let us foUow it
in the even more compUcated development of the inteW
ligence.

40

HENRY ADAMS
n
It would seem as if few human calUngs could afford a
wider basis for education in the broadest sense than
diplomacy, and Adams had the advantage of aU that
diplomacy could offer. His father cared for the inter
ests of the Union in London aU through the fierce
strain of the CivU War, and Henry, as his father's sec
retary, saw the inside working of men's hearts and
passions which that strain carried with it. He watched
everything curiously, gained a fascinating insight into
the peculiarities of EngUsh statesmanship, drew and
left to posterity profound and delicate studies of
Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and other figures,
some not soon to be forgotten and some forgotten al
ready. He sketched with a sure and vivid touch scenes
of historic or human significance, Uke that of his ap
pearance in society after the capture of Vicksburg.
Monckton Milnes, who loved the North, was there;
Delane, the editor of the Times, who did not love the
North, was there. Mihies rushed at Adams and kissed
him on both cheeks. Some might imagine "that such
publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came
from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening,
for the first tune in his Ufe, he happened not to be
thinking of himseff. He was thinking of Delane, whose
eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace.
Delane probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes's
foolery; he had never heard of young Adams, and never
dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the
Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the
41

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
mind of the American minister's son, for the British
mind is the slowest of all minds, as the files of the Times
proved, and the capture of Vicksburg had not yet pene
trated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas." *^ Saint-
Simon could not have done it better.
But as to education for himself, the private secretary
got nothing. In fact, these repeated, progressive, futile
efforts seemed only to be carrying him beyond z,ero into
the forlorn region of negative quantity. He found out
that he was incurably shy, reserved, unfitted for the
obtrusive conflicts of life. He tells us that he never had
an enemy or a quarrel. But without quarrels it is diffi
cult to win victories, even in the courteous atmosphere
of diplomacy. The result of his EngUsh experience
tended to Uttle but "the total derision and despair of
the lifelong effort for education." ^®
With practical politics at home m America it was the
same. Only here Adams, warned by varied observation
of others, made no attempt himself at even indirect
personal action. It became obvious to him at a very
early age that the sharp and clear decision on matters
that cannot be decided, which is the first thing re
quired of aU politicians, was quite impossible for him,
let alone the Ughtning facility in changing such deci
sions which gives the fine finish to a successful poUti-
cian's career. He had the true conservative's dislike of
innovation, not because he was satisfied with things
as they are, but because he had a vast dread of things
as they might be. "The risk of error in changing a
long-established course seems always greater to me
than the chance of correction, unless the elements
42

HENRY ADAMS
are known more exactly than is possible in human
affairs." "
But if he did not seek education, where some thuik
it is most surely to be found, in intense personal action,
at least he was never tired of observing the complex
ities and perplexities of American poUtical Ufe. And if
these did not give him education, they gave him amuse
ment, as they cannot fail to do his readers in his inter
pretation of them. He watched the doublings and
twistings and turnings of two generations of statesmen
in their efforts to harmonize their own ambition with
the welfare of democracy, and to him "their sufferings
were a long deUght," '* while he probed their souls with
the keenest and most searching analysis. His own
conclusion as to the workings of American government
was not enthusiastic. Cabinets were timid, congresses
were helter-skelter, presidents were inefficient, even
when well-intentioned, and one could not be sure that
they were always well-intentioned. What wonder that
the outcome of observation so dispassionate was hardly
educative for the observer! It certainly is not so for
his readers, except in the sense of disillusionment.
From the hard, harsh, clear-cut doings of practical
America, the inquiring, acquiring spirit naturally
turned at^ times to vaguer portions of the world, set
itself to discover whether education might not come
from travel and pure receptivity, suice it absolutely
refused to emanate from the strenuous action of com
mon life. The results, if hardly more satisfactory, were
always diverting. Rome? Oh, the charm of Rome I
But it could not weU be a profitable charm: "One's
43

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
personal emotions in Rome . . . must be hurtful, else
they could have been so intense." «' And again, Rome
was "the last place under the sun for educating the
young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot
that the young — of either sex and every race —
passionately, perversely, wickedly loved." *° It might
be supposed that at least travel would break up con
servatism, abolish fixed habits of thought and Ufe,
supple the soul as weU as the limbs, and make it more
quickly receptive of innovation and experiment. Not
with this soul, which found itself even more distmstful
of change abroad than at home. "The tourist was the
great conservative who hated novelty and adored
dirt." "
Such a consequence might perhaps be expected from
wandering in the Far East, where the flavor of dreamy
repose, whether in man or nature, infected everything.
But one would have thought that the bright, crystal,
sparkUng atmosphere of the American West might
animate, enUven, induce a brisker courage and a more
adventurous effort at existence. Taken beyond middle
age, however, it did not induce effort, but only restless
ness: "Only a certain intense cerebral restlessness sur
vived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants;
one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art
were a trotting-match." "
And if the 'sunshine of the Western plains could not
inspire ardor, it was not to be imagined that the gloomy
silences of the Arctic Circle would produce it. They
did not; they merely fed far-reaching, profound, and
futUe reflection on the battle of modem practical sci-
44

HENRY ADAMS
ence with the old, dead, dumb, withering forces of
nature. "An instaUation of electric lightmg and tele
phones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond
the level of th'e magnetic pole; and there the newer
Teuf elsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the
permanent electric Ughts of Hammerfest," *'
From aU this vast peregrination the conclusion is
"that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an
elderly man can pass a week alone .without ennui, and
none at all where he can pass a year," **
Was it better with the wanderings of the spirit than
with those of the flesh? Let us see. How was it with
art, the world's wide, infinitely varied, inexhaustible
human product of beauty? Surely no man ever had
better opportunity to absorb and assimilate all that art
has power to give to any one. Yet Adams's references to
the influence of art in general are vague and obscure.
He can indeed multiply paradox on that, as on any
subject, indefinitely. "For him, only the Greek, the
Italian, or the French standards had claims to respect,
and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to
Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice . . ,
he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative
Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very
Christian, but stupendously anarchistic." ** But tried
by the one final, ever-repeated test, all that art offers
is about as unsatisfactory as American politics or
tropical dreams, " Art was a superb field for education,
but at every turn he met the same old figure, like a
battered and iUegible signpost that ought to direct him
to the next station but never did," *•

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
One phase only of the vast outpourmg of artistic
beauty did engage the curious student, did for the time
distract hun wholly, involve and entangle his restless
spirit in its fascinating speU, the mediaeval art which he
has analyzed in "Mont-Samt-Michel and Chartres,"
The strange glamour, the puzzling and elusive sugges
tion and intimation, of Gothic architecture, the com
plex subtleties of Christian thought and feeUng, as
illustrated and illuminated by that architecture, seem
to have held him with an ahnost inexplicable charm;
and the insinuating, absorbing, dominating figure of
the Blessed Virgui, lit at once and shadowed by the
gUmmering glory of old unmatchable stained windows,
gave him something, at least offered him the tantalizmg
image of something, that modern thought and modern
wit and modern companionship could never supply.
Yet even here the final impression is that of remote
ness and unreality. What can a living soul get from a
dead religion? "The religion is dead as Demeter,
and its art alone survives as, on the whole, the highest
expression of man's thought or emotion," *^ Even to
feel the art, you have to make yourself other than you
are; and modern nerves, unstrung by the wide pursuit
of education, cannot stand this pressure long. "Any
one can feel it who will only consent to feel like a
child. . . . Any one willing to try could feel it like the
child, reading new thought without end into the art he
has studied a hundred times; but what is stiU more
convincing, he could at will, in an instant, shatter the
whole art by caUing uito it a single motive of his

own." "

46

HENRY ADAMS
So we must infer that the charm of this mediaeval
interlude was largely owing to its remoteness, to the
very fact that it was a world of dream and only dream,
requiring of the visitor none of the vulgar positive
action demanded by twentieth-century Washington.
And the very remoteness that made the charm took it
away; for souls of the twentieth century must live in
the twentieth century, after all.
No one lived in it more energetically than Adams, so
far as mere thinking was concerned. To turn from his
intimate acquaintance with mediaeval emdition to his
equally intimate contact with the most recent move
ment of science is indeed astonishing. His curious
youth seized upon the theories of Darwin, twisted
them, teased them, tormented them, to make them
furnish the vanishing specific which he believed himself
to be eternally seeking. They did not satisfy him. As
time went on, he found that they did not satisfy others,
and he plunged more deeply and more widely into
others' dissatisfaction, in order to confirm his own.
The patient erudition of Germany, the logical vivacity
of France, the persistent experimenting of England, aU
interested him, and from aU he turned away as rich —
and as poor — as he set out. No one has more gift than
he at making scientific speculation attractive, alive, at
giving it almost objective existence, so that you seem
to be moving, not among quaint abstractions of
thought, but among necessary realities, perverse, per
sistent creatures that may make life worth Uving or
not. HeCTnbodies theory tiU it tramps the earth. He
treats"the pterodactyl and the ichthyosaums with the
47

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
same intimate insolence as a banker in State Street or
an Adams in Quincy, and analyzes the weaknesses of
terebratula with as much pride as those of his grand-
jfather. Yet when you reflect, you thmk yourself at liberty
to feel a Uttle discontent with him, since he admits so
much with others. His exposition of all these scientific
questions is brilUant, paradoxical, immensely enter
taining. But no one makes you perceive more clearly
the difference between brilliancy and lucidity. In mild,
steady sunlight you can work out your way with plod
ding confidence; but a succession of dazzling flashes
only makes darkness more intolerable. Adams can
double the weight of unsolved problems upon you. He
cannot — at least he rarely does — even state a prob
lem with consistent, clear, orderly method, much less
follow out the long solution of one. His most instruc
tive effort in this Une is the "Letter to Teachers of
American History." Here are two hundred pages of
glittering pyrotechnic. You read it, and are charmed
and excited and shocked and left breathless at the end.
What is the tangible result? That the investigations of
modem science make it extremely doubtful whether
mankind has progressed within the lunits of recorded
history, or ever will progress or do anything but retro
grade, and that this famous discovery makes the teach
ing of history extremely difficult. WeU, it is another
added difficulty, if the discovery is correct, which
Adams would be the last to affirm with positiveness.
But it might have been stated in a few words, instead
of being amplified and complicated with endless repeti-
48

HENRY ADAMS
tion, all the more puzzling for its briUiancy. And among
the manifold serious troubles of a teacher of history,
this one almost disappears from its very remoteness.
Of those far more pressing, difficulties of treatment,
difficulties of method, difficulties of practical interest,
Adams discusses not a single one. I doubt if any
teacher of history ever laid down the " Letter" with the
feeling that he had been helped in any possible way.
Of the more abstract metaphysical thinking that
fills the latter part of the "Education" and of "Mont-
Saint-Michel," the same may be said as of the science.
Its breadth is astonishing and its brilUancy incom
parable. Every typical inteUigence from Aristotle to
Spencer is touched upon, with an especially long stop
at Saint Thomas Aquinas to sum up and crystallize the
whole. At first one is humbly impressed, then one is
bewildered, then one becomes sUghtly sceptical. The
result of it all seems too fluid, evanescent. Take the
mysterious theory of acceleration. Through various
preparatory chapters we are apparently led up to this.
Suddenly we find that we have passed it, and we mb
our eyes. The tmth is, when analyzed, the theory of
acceleration means that the nineteenth century moved
rather faster than the thirteenth. But surely it needs
no ghost come from the Middle Ages to tell us that.
Nor does Adams's latest philosophical work, "The
Rule of Phase Applied to History," improve matters
much, though the idea of acceleration is further devel
oped in it. The argument here is condensed after a
fashion that would seem of itself to make lucidity dif
ficult. But when one reflects upon such a tangle of
49

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
misleading analogies, one is inclined to feel that fuller
elaboration would only have left the lack of lucidity
more apparent.
And we are forced to conclude, with the metaphysics,
as with the science, that the thinking is more stunu-
lating than satisfying, more brilliant than profound.
There is an acute, curious, far-reaching, unfaiUng in
terest. There is not systematic, patient, logical, clari
fying order and method.
Also, with the lack of method, there is another
spiritual defect, perhaps even more serious. The ex
position of all these high philosophical ideas is more
paradoxical than passionate, and the reason is that the
thinker himself had not passion, had not the intense,
overpowering earnestness that alone gives metaphysi
cal speculations value, if not for their tmth, at any rate
for their influence. No doubt something of the impres
sion of dilettantism is due to the inheritance of New
England reserve which Adams never entirely shook off.
But the defect goes deeper, and one cannot help feeling
that he approaches the profoundest questions of life
and death in an attitude of amused curiosity. One
must not take passages like the foUowing too literally,
and one must realize that years somewhat modified the
flippancy of youth; but one must take them literally
enough: "Henry Adams was the first in an infinite
series to discover and admit to hunself that he really
did not care whether truth was, or was not, tme. He
did not even care that it should be proved tme, unless
the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwin
ian for fun." " SO

HENRY ADAMS
As to the last and most practical of all these varied
spiritual attempts at education, the attempt — and
the achievement — of authorship, one's conclusion is
much as with the others. The novels, the biographies, ]
above all, the "History of the United States,'^ are
among, the most brilliant productions of their tirgg.
They glitter with epigrams and dazzle with paradoxes
and puzzle with new interpretations and make one
think as one has rarely thought about the problems of
American life and character. Of them all the " History"
is the most important and the most enduring. It is
fascinating in parts, almost abnormally entertaining
m parts. But even m the "History," as a whole, there is
a lack of broad, structural conception, a tendency to
obscure large movement by detail, sometimes divert
ing and sometimes tedious. "*¦-
Moreover, I cannot help f eeUng the defect in Adams's
authorship that I felt in his general thinking, although
authorship was the most serious interest of his Ufe. He
spent days in dusty muniment rooms, fortified his
pages with vast labor and consistent effort, tried his
best to make himself and others think that he was
an earnest student of history. Yet, after aU his labor
and aU his effort, I at least cannot escape the impres
sion that he was an author "for fun."
Ill
It is precisely in this lack of seriousness that I find
the clue to the failure of Adams's whole colossal search
for education, so far as the education was anythmg
tangible and even the search was in any way serious.
51

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
I must repeat my ample allowance for the self-depre
ciation common to most autobiographies as weU as for
the dignified and conunendable reserve with which he
tells his story. Both his brother and his niece insist
upon his extreme shyness and reluctance to uitrude
his own experiences. But, after all, reserve is ratha:
out of place in confessions so free and intimate as
those of the "Education"; and through aU reserve the
exposure of the inner, the uunost, life is sufficiently
complete to show that the perpetual demand for ed
ucation was fatal to any overpowering ecstasy. When
he was a boy in coUege, his elders remarked that one
of his compositions was notable for lack of enthusiasm.
"The young man — always ui search of education —
asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this
absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit." ""
Whichever it was, it accompanied him always and is
the main key to his vast, absorbing work. What shall
be said of a man who in recountmg his own life up to
thirty makes no single mention of having his pulses
stirred, of being hurled out of himself by nature, or
love, or poetry, or God? What can any education be
that is not buUt on some tumultuous experience of one
or aU of these?
Take nature. In Adams's later life there are touches
that show that nature must always have had its hold
on him. When he returns from Europe in 1868, he
fmds "the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the
Maryland autumn ahnost unendurable for its strain
on one who had toned his life down to the November
grays and browns of Northern Europe." *' Yet note
52

HENRY ADAMS
even here that it is the unendurable side of passion and
ecstasy that cling. And the same sense of superiority
and wilful indifference peers through his wonderful
rendering of stiU later natural experiences: "In the
long summer days one found a sort of saturated green
pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the
little twelfth-century churches that lined them." ^'^
So with art. We have seen that he was entranced
with the Middle Ages, and we have guessed that this
was precisely because of theu unreality to a man of the
modem spirit. At any rate, there is no evidence any
where that he was rapt or carried away by any other
art whatever, either the sculpture of Greece, or the
painting of the fifteenth century or of the nineteenth.
"All styles are good which amuse," he says.^* The
Gothic and the Virgui amused him. When he was first
overwhelmed by the sense of Beethoven's music, he
describes this sense in a fashion intensely characteristic
(italics mine) as "so astonished at its own existence,
that he could not credit it, and watched it as some
thing apart, accidental, and not to be trusted." " With
poetry it is the same. His niece teUs us he was "pas
sionately fond of poetry." " I should have taken
"curiously fond" to be nearer the mark. In any event,
the fondness does not appear in his writings. He en
larges at huge length upon the epic and lyric produc
tions of the Middle Ages. Except for some elaborate
analyses of Petrarch — and this again is singularly
characteristic — in "Esther" and "The Life of George
Cabot Lodge," the poetry of the world might never have
existed, for aU the account his education takes of it.
53

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
I have before recognized that his utter failure to deal
with the educative power of human love may be owing
to a delicacy that we are bound to respect. But surely
the love of God might;,be handled without kid gloves.
Adams hardly handles it with or without them. Of
course in such an extensive syUabus of non-education
God has his place, with pteraspis and terebratula, and
is treated with the same famiUarity as those distant
ancestors, and the same remoteness. Adams also in
sists (italics mine) that "Religion is, or ought to be, a
feeling," " and in many pages of "Mont-Saint-Michel"
he shows an extraordinary power of entering into that
feeUng by mteUectual analysis. But when he seeks for
the feeling in himself, the result seems to be much
what he describes when he seeks it in the religious press
of the world about him: "He very gravely doubted,
from his aching consciousness of religious void, whether
any large fraction of society cared for a future life,
or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not
an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth
of faith or hope." *^ As a factor in education, God
counted for little more than terebratula.
The truth is, that in this infinitely reiterated demand
for education there is something too much of the ego
tism which Henry Adams inherited from his dis
tinguished great-grandfather and which had not been
altogether dissipated by the intermixture of two gen
erations of differing blood, it being always recognized
that egotism is perfectly compatible with shyness,
reserve, and even self-effacement. In the preface to his
autobiography Adams points out that the great les-
54

HENRY ADAMS
son of Rousseau to the autobiographer was to beware
of the Ego. In consequence Adams himself conscien
tiously avoids the pronoun " I " and writes of his efforts
and failures in the third person. As a result it appears
to me that the unpression of egotism is much increased.
We are all accustomed to the harmless habit of the
"I"; but to have Henry Adams constantly obtruding
Henry Adams produces a singular and in the end sin
gularly exasperating effect. One cannot help asking]
What does it matter to the universe if even an Adama
is not educated? What does it matter iTfifty years or
curious experience leave him to conclude that "He
seemed to know nothing — to be groping in darkness
— to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth
consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that
no one knew more"? ^* _
Not that one does not sympathize fully with the
admission of ignorance. The best and the wisest, the
most earnest and the most thoughtful, admit it every
where. The vast acceleration in knowledge of which
Adams complained is the distinguishing feature of the
twentieth century. We are swamped, buried, atrophied
in the immensity of our own learning. The speciaUst
is the only relic of old wisdom that survives, and the
specialist is but a pale and flickering torch to illumi
nate the general desolation.
But even here it is Adams's attitude that is unsatis
factory, not his conclusions. He proclaims that his life
is spent in an effort to seek education; but one cannot
escape feeling that he is not very eager to find it. He
bewails the overwhelming burden of ignorance that
55

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
descends upon him, appears to bewaU it; but one can
not help feeling that his grief is largely rhetorical and
that, so long as ignorance enables him to gild a phrase
or turn an epigram, he can forgive it. He "mixed him
self up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort
of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fa
tigued senses." ** "True ignorance approaches the
infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge
can do."*" When a student so much enjoys trifling
with the difficulties of his education, he is not likely to
make very rapid progress in overcoming them.
Simple and quiet as Adams himself was in his daily
life, the thing he most mistrusted, intellectually and
spiritually, was sunpUcity. "The lesson of Garibaldi,
as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity
of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this
from a glow-worm." *^ Again: "This seemed simple as
running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful
mistress that ever betrayed man." ^^ And he disliked
simpUcity because it was the key to aU his difficulties,
as he himself perfectly well knew. He spent his Ufe
tramping the world for education; but what he really
needed was to be de-educated, and this also he was
quite weU aware of. He needed not to think, but to
Uve. But he did not want to live. It was easier to sit
back and proclaim Ufe unworthy of Henry Adams than
it was to lean forward with the whole soul in a passion
ate, if inadequate, effort to make Henry Adams worthy
of life. Mary Lyon would have seemed to this wide
seeker for education very humble and very benighted;
but aU Mary Lyon cared to teach her pupils was that
56

HENRY ADAMS
"they should live for God and do something." " If^hel
could have communicated some such^ recipe to Henryl
Adams, she might have solved his problem, though she
would have robbed the world of many incomparable (
phrases. And even higher — and humbler — authority
tKan"Mary Lyon declared that we must become as lit
tle children if we would enter the kingdom of heaven.
Perhaps the end of the twentieth century wiU take this
as the last word of education, after alL

Ill
SIDNEY LANIER

CHRONOLOGY
Sidney Lanier.
Born in Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842.
Graduated from Oglethorpe University, 1860.
Taught at Oglethorpe University, 1860-1861.
In Confederate service during Civil War, 1861-1865.
In Union prison four months, 1864-1865.
Published Tiger Lilies, 1867.
Married Mary Day, December 21, 1867.
Practised law, 1868-1872,
Decided on artistic career April, 1873.
Wrote "Centennial Cantata," 1876.
Appointed lecturer on English literature, Johns Hopkins
University, 1879.
Died, Lynn, North Carolina, September 7, 1881.

Ill
SIDNEY LANIER

Lanier lived in a spiritual whirlwind, until it snuffed
him out. His whole existence was a fight with cir
cumstances; but if every external circumstance had
been easy for him, still he would have nourished a
perpetual tumult and turmoil within. Our life is no
dreaming idyl, but " the hottest of aU battles," ^ he says
himself. Again, he says of his sojourn in New York,
" I am continually and increasingly amazed at the in
tense rate of life at which I have to live here." * The
rate at which he always lived would have astonished
some men.
Nor was the instinct of fighting wholly figurative or
spiritual. As a mere cMld, Lanier organized a military
company among his Georgia playmates, and driUed
them so thoroughly that they were admitted to parade
beside their elders. Before he was a man, the Civil
War came, and he enlisted in the cause of his beloved
South and served her with distinction. Military glory
was not the kind he sought. He was not the least of a
bravo or a ranter, and the references in his letters to
his military experiences are few and slight. But a
touch now and then shows that he knew what suffering
was and what endurance was: "Did you ever lie for a
whole day after being wounded, and then have water
61

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
brought you? If so, you will know how your words
came to me." * And if he had felt the agony and strain
of war, so he responded with the keenest thrill to its
picturesqueness, its fever of excitement, its glow and
glory: "Our life, during this period, was as full of ro
mance as heart could desire. We had a fiute and a
guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid resi
dences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty
of hair-breadth escapes from the roving bands of Fed
erals who were continually visiting that Debateable
Land. I look back upon that as the most delicious
period of my life in many respects. Cliff and I never
cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades,
the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair BurweJl's
Bay . . . and the spirited bmshes of our Uttle force
with the enemy." *
But the clash of physical war was the least part of
Lanier's fierce and constant struggles with circum
stance. From his youth tfll his death, in 1881, in his
fortieth year, he had iU-health against him, had to con
tend not only with actual disease and pain, but with
the depression and listless, hopeless discouragement,
which disease and pain bring with them and leave be
hind them. The results of this incessant struggle were
written on his face and figure, manly and dignified and
noble as they were. The worn carriage showed it, the
finely cut features, the deep, earnest, passionate eyes,
the hands that were vigorous, but white and delicate.
He understood and analyzed his condition perfectly.
Sometimes he trumpeted those fits of exaltation which
seem to lift the tuberculous invalid above the world:
62

SIDNEY LANIER
" I feel to-day as if I had been a dry leathery carcass of
a man, into whom some one had pumped strong cur
rents of fresh blood, of abounding Ufe, and of vigorous
strength. I cannot remember when I have felt so crisp,
so springy, and so gloriously unconscious of lungs." ^
But again he describes consumptives as "beyond all
measure the keenest sufferers of all the stricken of this
world," * or casually speaks of himself, "Tortured as I
was this morning, with a Uving egg of pain away in
under my collar bone." '' Yet never for a moment
could pain or lassitude subdue him or make him give
up the struggle to do his work. In the splendid mo
ments of hope he worked. In the dark, dull moments
of despair he worked. He wrote "Sunrise" when his
temperature was 104. He delivered his last course of
lectures when so weak that his hearers feared he would
expire in the chair. If ever a man died fighting, he did.
All these strains and torments of Ul-health are bad
enough when one has means to meet them, can afford
at least the necessary lenitives, without anxiety as to
where every dollar is coming from. This was far from
being the case with Lanier. No one ever lived who was
more indifferent to money in itself than he, who would
have cared less for the excitement or the satisfaction
of accumulating wealth. He did not even long for
the finer luxuries and elegancies that go with wealth,
though every artist can sympathize with the remark of
Gray: "Swift somewhere says, that money is liberty;
and I fear money is friendship too and society, and al
most every external blessing. It is a great though ill-
natured comfort to see most of those who have it m
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
plenty without pleasure, without liberty, and without
friends." » With Lanier it was a case of hard, bitter
straggle for actual necessaries. Brought up in the full
taste of Southern ease and abundance, he found hun
self, at the close of the war, Uke so many Southerners,
beginning life in the most cramping bonds of poverty,
obliged to fight his way upward from the bottom against
every difficulty that material obstacles could oppose to
him. Determined as he was to win success in hnes of
work not in themselves profitable, or only rarely and
poorly so, he could not labor to get money with the
single energy which is most of all necessary to achieve
that result.
How desperate, how constant, how bUghting this
need of money was is written all through Lanier's bi
ography and letters. Bread, mere, bare bread is the
word that occurs and recurs. Indiscreet utterance
"may interfere with one's already very short allowance
of bread." * Again, "My head and my heart are both
so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread
does not give me time to put on paper." i"
Any honest means of earning is resorted to. To all
are given earnest, conscientious effort. Comfort and
independence are achieved from none. Teaching? The
last pitiful refuge of those who have immortal thoughts
to seU? "'Tis terrible work, and the labor difficulties
. . . make the pay very slim." " Government em
ployment? It requires influence, and immortal thoughts
are the last requisite for it. "I have allowed a friend to
make application to every department in Washington
for even the humblest position . . . but without suc-
64

SIDNEY LANIER
cess." " The strain wears out body, wears out soul,
wears out courage, wears out hope. "Altogether it
seems as if there was n't any place for me in this world,
and if it were not for May, I should certainly quit it, in
mortification at being so useless," " To some it ap
pears that his physical decay has a physical cause; but
he finds the cause rather in "the bitterness of having
to spend my time in making academic lectures and
boy's books — pot-boUers all — when a thousand songs
are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I
do not utter them soon," ^*
For among all these external struggles, the most in
tense and passionate, made of course doubly so by the
distraction of the others, was the struggle for reputation,
recognition, success in the positive career, or careers,
since music was almost as dear to him as poetry,
that he had chosen for himself. And in this struggle,
more than in any other, come the fierce alternations
of hope and despair, "Through poverty, through pain,
through weariness, through sickness , , , these two fig
ures of music and of poetry have steadily kept in my
heart so that I could not banish them," ^^ But some
times they hover close with intimate glory, making all
life golden, and the past sacred and the future sure;
sometimes they fade and shift and almost vanish, serv
ing rather as an added torment than as a support or
refuge. In the first rapture of achievement, after the toU and
travail of creation, work actually finished seems worth
doing, seems never indeed a fuU realization of one's
ideal, but seems at any rate to embody something of
65

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
what one aimed at, what one hoped for. One is proud
of it, if not satisfied with it, and above all one is in
spired by what one has done with infinite confidence m
what one can do. "So many great ideas for Art are
bom to me each day, I am swept away into the land of
All-Delight by theu strenuous sweet whirlwind." "
And then comes the reaction and the despair. What
seemed yesterday a masterpiece, to-day sounds dull
and poor and tawdry, and that land of AU-DeUght be
comes merely barren as your heart.
As some stay against this wretched self-distmst, this
bankruptcy of confidence, you must have the recogni
tion of others. There are times when your own ap
proval is enough. There are times when it seems as
nothing, and even so you cannot get it. Then a simple
word of appreciation may bring heaven to you. To be
sure, instead of appreciation there may be indifference
and neglect, and the dread of these may tempt you to
hug your own approval in self-sufficient solitude: "I'd
like to send a poem or two occasionally, or an essay;
but I dread rejection Uke a mad lover." " Yet you
send the poem and you face the public, and if you
have genius as Lanier had, the moments of recogni
tion and glory will come, however rare, and the rarer
the sweeter. To be told by an intelligent admirer
"that I was not only the founder of a school of music,
but the founder of American music," ^^ is intoxicating,
even if you do not beUeve it. Even more intoxicating
is it to feel and see that you have carried a great
company of people out of themselves, as Lanier so
often did by his wonderful flute-playing. "When I
66

SIDNEY LANIER
allowed the last note to die, a simultaneous cry of pleas
ure broke forth from men and women that almost
amounted to a shout, and I stood and received the
congratulations that thereupon came in, so wrought
up by my own playing with thoughts, that I could
but smile mechanically, and make stereotyped returns
to the pleasant sayings, what time my heart worked
falteringly, Uke a mouth that is about to cry." ^^
And even such triumph is not enough for the eager
spirit; but it yearns for more creation and more recog
nition and more and more. There is no bound, no limit,
because beauty is limitless and life is limitless. To be
the founder of American music would be well; but
might there not be something more than that, some
thing, who can tell what? In debating the true bent of
his genius, Lanier says: "I cannot bring myself to be
lieve that I was intended for a musician, because it
seems so small a business in comparison with other
things which, it seems to me, I might do." '"' And so
through all the long and bitter struggle with circum
stance the soul goes staggering, reaching onward, with
no rest, no respite, because the outer struggle is but the
unage and reflection of the deeper and more passionate
struggle within. II
For Lanier's was none of those contented spirits who
meet the battle of the world with a quiet and self-
subdued mastery, who oppose to its mde shocks the
unfailing tenacity of a clear and four-square purpose.
With him the inner worid was as fuU of battle as the
67

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
outer. His thinking life was one long effort to solve
problems, to break through difficulties instead of dodg
ing them, to reach the last analysis of his own soul and
the souls of others. "Intellectually," says one who
knew hun well, " he seemed to me not so much to have
arrived as to be on the way, — with a beautiful fervor
and eagerness about things." ^^ He was always on the
way, always would have been, moving, growing, devel
oping, longing. Life could never have stood still for
him, never have stagnated. There was always some
problem to be met, to be fought with, to be conquered.
For such a nature the moral life meant stmggle, of
course. Little errors became great sins and had to be
mourned over with a repentance wholly out of propor
tion to the fault. "My father, I have sinned. With
what intensity of thought, with what deep and eamest
reflection have I contemplated this lately ! My heart
throbs with the intensity of its anguish." ^^ But the
same ardor was carried into the aesthetic world, also.
The enjoyment of great beauty, in music or in poetry,
was ]not a serene enchantment, a mere ecstatic oblivion,
but was sought with suffering and mamtained with
long effort and paid for too often with enormous lassi
tude. Spiritual delight is dearly bought, perhaps not
too dearly bought, but .dearly bought, at any rate,
when it has to be described like this: "I have just con
cluded a half-dozen delicious hours, during which I
have been devouring, with a hungry ferocity of rapture
which I know not how to express, 'The Life of Robert
Schumann.'" " And Lanier's own criticism of this
same Schumann is certainly by no means tme of Lanier
68

SIDNEY LANIER
hunself: "His sympathies were not big enough, he did
not go through the awful stmggle of genius, and lash
and storm and beat about until his soul was grown
large enough to embrace the whole of life and the AU
of things." 24
Even in matters of pure intelligence, not essentially
aesthetic or emotional, even in curious metaphysical or
psychological speculations, of no direct bearing on the
conduct of life, Lanier showed the same intensity and
activity and sincerity. To Mark Twain thought was
an amusing diversion, to Henry Adams it was a splen
did stimulant of curiosity, to Lanier it was a despotic
master. He thought with passion, did not play with
ideas or trifle with them, but threw himself upon
them, fiercely determined to get rid of the rags and
shroudings of tradition and convention and thrust way
down to the solid structure of naked verity. " Thought,
too," he says, "is camivorous. It lives on meat. We
never have an idea whose existence has not been pur
chased by the death of some atom of our fleshly tis
sue." 2^ He never had, at any rate, and he paid for
intellectual emancipation with throbbing fragments of
his heart. He speaks somewhere of "the Latin works
of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study," "^
and in whom he found a friend. For in all literature
and in all thought there is no soul who made thinking
more of a battle than Lucretius did, and Lanier is like
him. It is this fighting quaUty of the analysis, rather than
its actual result, that gives a profound interest to La
nier's critical writmgs. His books on the English novel
69

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
and on the science of EngUsh verse may not have
permanent critical value. Their ample abundance of
theorizing may not always work out to a final and sat
isfying illumination of fact. But there is an intensity,
a throb, in their spuitual movement that whirls you
along with it, whether you agree or not. Indeed, the
intellectual activity is too great for clarity. Every
sunplest element and principle is subjected to an un
compromising test of investigation and is torn to pieces
with an ingenuity of insight which discovers fine
threads of affinity and causality hardly perceptible to
ordinary, coarser vision. Again, as with Lucretius, one
feels that one is Mattered with a storm of solutions for
problems that can be solved more simply or need not
be solved at all. And, as with Lucretius, one is some
times moved to pity, to see such a splendid intelligence
wearing itself out for futile results.
But the passion for theory, for getting to the bottom
of things, is infectious, just the same. It inspires La
nier's readers to-day. It inspired aU who listened to his
admirable lecturing at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.
The passion is manifest not only in Lanier's formal
criticism, but in aU his writing and thinking. "I don't
mean this for a theory," he says in one case; "I hate
theories." *^ But, hate them or not, he was bom to
theorize; not to accept bUndly the theories of others,
not to wallow widely in inherited formulae: "Why do
we cling so to humbugs?" ^ he cries. But into hum
bugs and into the crowding facts of life and into the
elusive secrets of passion he loved to plunge the fine
instrument of thought and twist it and turn it, with a
70

SIDNEY LANIER
touching confidence that it would at last lead him to
the inmost shrine of tmth. He was no disbeliever in
intellect, no doubter of the supremacy of reason, he
was not smothered with education until he came to
despise it altogether, like Henry Adams. He beUeved
that the secrets of God could be wrestled for, that
every" good thing was an object of combat and conquest,
and that, whatever peace might be in heaven, life on
this earth, to be Ufe at all, must be perpetual war. "A
soul and a sense linked together in order to fight each
other more conveniently, compose a man," ^'
III
At the same time I would not give the impression that
Lanier was always fighting, that he was one of those
uncomfortable persons who thrust their combative
tendencies into the face of every interlocutor or house
mate. Far from it. His external battles were confined
to proper occasions, and such unfailing conflict as he
had within was masked by perfect control and gracious
dignity and ease. To chat with him an hour you would
never suspect that he carried a world war in his heart.
Moreover, like all great fighters whose fights are
worth anything, he had his hours of peace, his intervals
of relaxation, when he could forget the fierce violence
of thought. His appeal to tranquilUty does indeed seem
more like a longing than a hope:
" Oh 1 as thou liv'st in all this sky and sea
That likewise lovingly do live in thee.
So melt my soul in thee, and thine in me.
Divine Tranquillity I" 5"
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Yet even in the furious ardor of his art there were
charming moments of refreshment and repose. Crea
tion was a stmggle, but the struggle of creation af
forded a comparative respite from the colder and more
hopeless struggle of thought. After spending long
hours and long years in the endeavor to disentangle
theological complications, sesthetic delight seemed at
least sure and enduring, however it tantalized, and the
disheartened thinker could cry, with a feeling of relief,
"an unspeakable gain has come to me in simply turn
ing a certain phrase the other way: the beauty of holi
ness becomes a new and wonderful saying to me when
I figure it to myself in reverse as the holiness of
beauty." "
Music, though in a sense more than any the art of
struggle, though its essence seems to consist of effort
for the impossible, of discords resolved only to be
perpetually renewed and to seek for new resolution
forever, music has its suggestions of wide quiet and
all-involving peace, only the more celestial for their
rarity. Writing, which at times tears the soul to shreds
with its turbulent effort, which at times means only a
vain, futile, exhausting wrestle with thoughts that wiU
not be disciplined and words that flit away, writing
also has its glorious compensations, when all the puz
zles vanish, and sudden, splendid phrases come from
unknown depths and fit into their perfect sequence
with divine smooth ease. "I can't tell you with what
ravishing freedom and calmness I find myself writing,
in these days, nor how serene and sunny the poetic
region seems to Ue, in front, like broad upland fields
72

SIDNEY LANIER
and slopes. I write aU the time, and sit down to the
paper with the poems already done." ^^
And there was other more common human relaxation
also, hours of putting work aside and thought aside
altogether and just dabbling in sunshine and simple
pleasantness. Like most Southerners, Lanier loved a
good horse, and a rush through the nipping winter wind
helped to shake out the creases in his soul and brush
the crumbs of doubt from them. " I have at command
a springy mare, with ankles like a Spanish girl's, upon
whose back I go darting through the green overgrown
woodpaths like a thrasher about his thicket." '*
And he found and loved the repose of Nature even
more than her activity. He knew well that the best
medicine for the insupportable fatigue of thought is
the quiet of green fields and the mellow oblivion of
autumn sunshine. Sometimes he simply touches the
soothing features of the outward world and leaves the
peace they brought him for the reader to divine: "The
sun is shining with a hazy and absent-minded face, as
if he were thinking of some quite other star than this
poor earth; occasionally a little wind comes along, not
warm, but unspeakably bland, bringing strange scents
rather of leaves than of flowers." ** Sometimes he
makes perfectly plain what Nature does for him and
what she might do for you also: "To-day you must
forego expression and aU outcome, you must remain a
fallow field, for the sun and wind to fertilize, nor shall
any com or flowers sprout into visible green and red
until to-morrow." '^
Nor is he always serious m his relaxation, but recog-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
nizes that sweet and kindly laughter relieves tense
nerves and fervid brains more completely than al
most anything, else, that it at once indicates that the
soul is free from care and makes it so. What could be
more sunny than the freakish humor that runs through
the history of Bob, the mocking-bird? And laughter
not only relaxed, but comforted; for the harsh pressure
of circumstance, and the bitterness of neglect and re
jection were made more tolerable by it. A man could
not play more lightly with the peace of home after
poverty-stricken wandering than in phrases like these:
"I confess I am a little nervous about the gas-biUs,
which must come in, in the course of time . . . but then
the dignity of being liable for such things ! is a very sup
porting consideration. No man is a Bohemian who has
to pay water-rates and a street tax. Every day when
I sit down in my dining-room — my dining-room! — I
find the wish growing stronger that each poor soul in
Baltimore, whether saint or sinner, could come and
dine with me. How I would carve out the merry
thoughts for the old hags! How I would stuff the big
wall-eyed rascals till their rags ripped again." '^
As these words indicate, his social, human instincts
went always abreast with his love of merriment. The
true life of his soul was solitary, but he would step out
of it at any time to feel the warm touch of his fellows
and revel in it. And his heart gave warmth as well as
drank it in. His large, sunny cheerfulness was infec
tious, inspired cheerfulness in all about him, even
strangers. As one who knew him well said, "If he took
his place in a crowded horse-car, an exhilarating at-
74

SIDNEY LANIER
mosphere seemed to be introduced by his breezy
ways," *' Or, as he himself expressed it, from the
deeper, inner point of view, "any bittemess is there
fore small and unworthy of a poet," '^ Not but that he
had a temper, could feel a poet's fiery indignation at
wrong or meanness or injustice, as when he stood up in
his place, in the middle of an orchestra rehearsal, and
told the conductor who had spoken brutally to a young
woman at the piano just what he thought of him,'*
But the temper never hardened into suUenness, never
secreted a long grudge or a blighting quarrel, "I was
never able to stay angry in my life." *"
He liked to share his pleasures with his friends, too.
He recognized that music is the eminently social art
and entered with a splendid, ardent zest into the com
mon enjoyment of it. He delighted in a fascinating
human mixture of tangled diversions, "Kinsfolk, men
friends, women friends, books, music, wine, hunting,
fishing, billiards, tenpins, chess, eating, mosquitoless
sleeping, mountain scenery, and a month of idleness." ^^
He stepped out with ease and grace from the exclusive
society of high thoughts: "I hope those are not illegiti
mate moods in which one sometimes desires to sur
round one's self with a companionship less awful, and
would rather have a friend than a god." " He even
recognized that the friction of brains with each other is
sometimes necessary to push thought to its highest:
"There's not enough attrition of mind on mind here,
to bring out any sparks from a man." "
Lastly, and perhaps in Lanier's case most important,
among all the forms of refuge and repose from the harsh
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
struggle of existence we must place the mighty solace oi
domestic love and home, Lanier married quite early a
very charming woman, and her companionship and
comfort were the greatest possible reUef in aU his trou
bles and difficulties. Though he wandered widely and
his artist's calUng took him among all sorts of people
and made him friends with all sorts, there was nothing
of the Bohemian in his nature. He loved the ties of
life, all of them; did not find them ties but sweet inti
macies; loved to bind the large divagation of his spirit
to the quiet daily habits of hearth and home. And
he shared all his ecstasies and enthusiasms with her
whom he loved, so far as such things can be shared
on this solitary and confining earth. If great beauty
came to him in her absence, his enjoyment of it was
not quite perfect, not quite satisfying without her:
"For I mostly have great pain when music, or any
beauty, comes past my way, and thou art not by.
Perhaps this is because music takes us out of prison,
and I do not like to leave prison unless thou goest
also." " Again, " Oh, if thou couldst but be by me in
this sublime glory of music! All through it I yearned
for thee with heart-breaking eagerness." ^^ And the
solace of childhood, its grace, its gayety, its wild, way
ward self-assertion, shifting into absolute dependence,
varied exquisitely the mood of this higher companion
ship. "Nothing could be more keen, more fresh, more
breezy, than the meeting together of their little im
mense loves with the juicy selfishness and honest
animalisms of the dear young cubs." ** While the
affection for children and wife both is enlarged and
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SIDNEY LANIER
interfused with the wider charity which aims to spread
its all involving grasp over those near and far away
and like and unlike: "Let us lead them to love every
thing in the world, above the world, and under the
world adequately; that is the sum and substance of a
perfect life." " IV
Yet, after all, these elements of repose and distraction,
even the most sacred, were but secondary to the mighty
effort and struggle to succeed, to achieve, to do great
things in the world, to leave a name that should never
die. And one asks one's self, as in so many similar
cases, but especially with Lanier, because the stmggle
was so definite and so desperate, what was the motive
back of it all? Why should a man fling aside health and
wealth and ease and the endless variety of ephemeral
diversion to give the world what it never asks for
and to demand of it in return what it yields only
with brutal reluctance and usually too late? What is
the fierce sting, the cruel, driving spur that urges the
artist onward, tiU one is sometimes ahnost tempted to
conclude that genius consists in the sting itself even
more than in the gifts and powers that it forces to its
service? Is it the mere desire of praise, of applause, of having
men honor you and esteem you, point you out and seek
your work and treasure it, volitare per ora virorum, as
the Latin poet expressed it better than any one has ex
pressed it since? The best and wisest have recognized
this motive, sometimes frankly, sometimes reluctantly
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and with vain effort to hide it under other names. The
young Milton knew well that
"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise."
Lanier, who analyzed and dissected everything, did
not overlook the value of praise in aU its forms:
"Much reflection convinces me that praise is no ignoble
stimulus, and that the artist should not despise it." **
"Although I am far more independent of praise than
formerly, and can do without it perfectly well: yet,
when it comes, I keenly enjoy it." "
Again, besides the mere love of fame and of ap
plause, there is in the artist the passionate desire to
create things beautiful. This seems to be quite differ
ent from the appreciation of such things, though nat
urally such appreciation is implied in it. There are
plenty of persons whose sense of all beauty is exquisite,
evidently as exquisite as that of any creative artist,
who yet are content to absorb and never to give out,
who never apparently have the impulse to reproduce
or rival the masterpieces that give them the intensest
pleasure of their Uves. But the artist cannot rest with
out the devouring effort to realize a new beauty, a
different beauty, a beauty more overwhelming, more
enduring than even that which intoxicates his whole
being as he receives it from others. Many doubtless
have felt this passion as keenly as Flaubert and Keats.
None has more passionately recorded it. It is the cry
that echoes in Phineas Fletcher's simple line,
" Ah, singing let me live and singing die."
It echoes everywhere in the letters of Sidney Lanier.
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SIDNEY LANIER
"It was a spiritual necessity, I must be a musician, I
could not help it." *" "The fury of creation is upon
me."'i "This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied
Triumphs uresistibly invites the soul of a man to cre
ate other processions like it. I would I might lead a so
magnificent file of glories into heaven." ^*
And with the instinct of creating beauty, there is the
instinct of diffusing it. In some artists this appears to
be lacking. They are content to achieve the beautiful,
to scatter it about them, to leave it behind them, with
out considering or caring whether the world learns to
enjoy it or not. Not theirs to create the hearing ear or
the seeing eye. Let such creep in their traces and slowly
arrive at comprehension. It was different with Lanier.
He burned to make others feel what he felt, aU that he
felt. Beauty was not to be his alone, whether con
ceived or created. It was to Ught the whole wide world
with a radiant glory. "We are aU striving for one end,"
he cried, transfiguring other artists with his own ardor,
and that is "to develop and ennoble the humanity of
which we form a part." " He could not understand that
musicians could be content to give subtle aesthetic emo
tion to a few, when it was possible to "set the hearts of
fifteen hundred people afire." "
So we analyze vaguely, unperfectly, the deep mo
tives that lay at the root of such a life stmggle as
Lanier's. Yet who shall say that we have quite touched
the secret, or really, finaUy explained why a man
should be willing to wear out his life striving, striving,
striving for a goal that forever fades away?

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V
As we have analyzed the nature of the struggle and its
fury and its motive, so let us consider its outcome and
result. There is the result for the artist himself and
the result for others. And for himself there is no doubt
that the struggle means Ufe. It often means death
also, as it did for Keats and for Lanier. Oftener still
it means death in life, health shattered through long
years, nerves broken and unstrung, quivering to utter
exhaustion with misduected effort and inadequate
desire. The joy of successful creation is shot through
with ardor that consumes even whUe it intoxicates.
" Our souls would be like sails at sea; and the irresistible
:storm of Music would shred them as a wind shreds can
vas, whereof the fragments writhe and lash about in
the blast which furiously sports with their agony." "
Yet withal he who has once tasted the creative rapture
knows nothing else that can be called living beside it.
Certainly Lanier's testimony on the point is as explicit
as any one's: "To die, consumed by these heavenly
fires: — that is infinitely better than to live the tepid
lives and love the tepid loves that belong to the lower
planes of activity." ^'^ And if he says so, it is beyond
question true for him; for no man ever Uved more fully
for the rapture or died more patently from the domina
tion of it.
And the result for others? In Lanier's case, the value
of example is clear, even disregarding actual achieve
ment. He was a Southerner, always a Southerner. He
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SIDNEY LANIER
loved the South, and the South loved and loves him.
And in his day the spur of that glorious spirit, ever
toUing, ever hoping, giving up aU material success for
the long pursuit of an ideal, was the very stimulus that
the young men of the South needed above aU others.
Who shall say that the young men of the whole coun
try do not need and cannot profit by it now?
Moreover, Lanier's ardent struggle bore fruit in a
considerable literary product. Of this the prose crit
icism and other writings have their value and wUl
probably continue to be read with pleasure by a lunited
number. But it is the poems that give their author a
permanent place in American literature. With their
purely literary quality the psychographer does not con
cern himself. The testimony of critics of different
schools is enough on this point. But to one who comes
to the poems fresh from the close study of Lanier's in
ner life, they must necessarily prove a little disappoint
ing. He gave them grace and dignity and charm and,
above all, music ; but why could he not put his soul into
them? He gave them thought and observation, magic
of description, and witchery of movement; but why
could he not put his soul into them? Flaubert dili
gently kept his soul out of his novels, and the conse
quence is that the letters to Mademoiselle X are worth
a dozen "Salammbos" and "Education Sentunen-
tales." But with Flaubert it was a matter of theory.
With Lanier it would seem to be rather an instinctive
reserve. Lucretius made aU life a fight, as Lanier made
it; Lucretius, of whom Lanier himself says,

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"Lucretius mine
(For oh, what heart hath loved thee like to this
That's now complaining?) " "
Then Lucretius took the dullest subjects in the world,
and, because he poured the whole of his fighting soul
into them, he left the tangled thorns through which he
tore his way all glorified with shreds of luminous im-
mortaUty. Lanier chose the most promisuig, the most
poetical subjects; but somehow the battling spirit is
not there. As he himself most aptly says of another,
"There is a certain something — a flame, a sentiment,
a spark kindled by the stroke of the soul against sorrow,
as of steel against flint — which he hath not." ^* " Sim-
rise" and "The Marshes of Glynn" are no doubt mu
sical, magical, enduring poetry. But there is more to
stir my spirit in the following lines, which throb with
the actual passion of the long, despairing fight:
"Given, these.
On this, the coldest night in all the year.
From this, the meanest garret in the world.
In this, the greatest city in the land.
To you, the richest folk this side of death.
By one, the hungriest poet under heaven,
— Writ while his candle sputtered in the gust,
. And while his last, last ember died of cold.
And whUe the mortal ice i' the air made free
Of all his bones and bit and shrunk his heart.
And while soft Luxury made show to strike
Her gloved hands together and to smile
What time her weary feet unconsciously
Trode wheels that Ufted Avarice to power,
— And while, moreover, — 0 thou God, thou God ->^i
His worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar,
Within the village whence she sent him forth
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SIDNEY LANIER
Into the town to make his name and fame.
Waiting, all confident and proud and calm.
Till he should make for her his name and fame.
Waiting — 0 Christ, how keen this cuts I — large-eyed,
With Baby Charley till her husband make
For her and him a poet's name and fame." "
Here, at any rate, we have a shred of Lanier's heart.

IV
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

CHRONOLOGY
James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler,
Born, Lowell, Massachusetts, July 10, 1834.
In Russia, 1843-1848,
At West Point, 1851-1854,
Went to Paris to study, 1855.
Painted mainly in London and Paris till his death.''
Ruskin trial, 1878,
Venice, 1879, 1880.
Married Beatrix (Philip) Godwin, August 11, 1888.
Wife died. May 10, 1896.
Died in London, July 17, 1903.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

IV
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

The problem with Whistler is to reconcile a great
artist with a Uttle man; or, if not a Uttle man, an odd
man, an eccentric man, a curious, furious creature,
who flitted through the world, making epigrams and
enemies, beloved and hated, laughing and laughable,
and painting great pictures. He was glorified by his
hand and damned by his tongue.
The task of disentangling this snarled soul is made
much more difficult by the perplexity of records. What
Uttle he hunself wrote helps, so far as it goes. But it
does not go far; and we have largely to deal with a
cloud of legend, sometimes rosy, sometimes lurid, ac
cording to the reporter, but always obscuring and
deceitful. Anecdotes are told in a dozen different ways,
and there is seldom that care for verbal authenticity
which is essential with a spirit at once so precise and so
evasive. The chroniclers are baffling, when they mean
to be helpful. The shrewd invent, the duU misappre
hend. Take a single instance. ,One of the best-known
Whistler stories is that of the answer to a lady who
declared that there was no one like Whistler and Velas
quez : " Madam, why drag in Velasquez? " An obsequi
ous follower actually inquired of the Master, whether
he really meant this. ^ When they are subjected to such
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BosweUs, who can blame the Doctor Johnsons and the
Whistlers for running riot?
Whistler was born m LoweU, like other great men.
He did not like it, would have preferred his mother's
Southem dweUing-place, and sometunes implied that
he was born in Baltimore. He declared in court Uiat he
was bom in Saint Petersburg. He once said to an
inquisitive model: "My child, I never was born. I came
from on high"; and the model answered, with a friv
olous impertinence that charmed him, "I should say
you came from below," * He was as reticent about his
age as he was about his birthplace. But the hard fact
is that he was bom in Lowell in 1834. To be bom in
LoweU, to grow up in Russia, to be educated at West
Point, to paint in France and England, with vague
dashes to Venice and Valparaiso, and to die in London
at seventy make a sufficiently variegated career. Even
so, it was less variegated without than withm.
Through the whole of it his life was in the pencil and
brush, and the world to him was a world of Une and
color. As a small child he drew in Russia and laughed
at the painting of Peter the Great. At West Point he
drew his instructors, mockingly. In the Coast Survey
service he made exquisite official drawings — and odd
faces on the margins of them. And, tiU he died, laugh
ter and fighting may have been his diversions, but
drawing and painting were his serious business.
The only serious one. Few human beings have taken
less interest in the general affairs of men. Even for the
other arts he had Uttle thought to spare, except as they
affected his own. Poetry did not touch him, unless an
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
occasional jingle. Tragedy he found ludicrous. He
Uked to fetch analogies from music, but he knew noth
ing about it and cared nothing for it. When Sarasate
was being painted and played for him. Whistler was
fascinated with the flight of the bow up and down the
strings. The music escaped him.
Apparently he read Uttle, except to gratify a special
fancy. He adored Poe. He read Balzac and the writers
of that group. The Pennells insist that he must have
read widely, because he had so much general informa
tion. Others say that he rarely touched a book. Prob
ably the tmth is that his reading was limited, but that
a most retentive memory kept forever anything that
impressed him. However this may be, in all the records
and biographies I have found little trace of his convers
ing or wishing to converse on ordinary topics of general
interest. To politics and the wide range of social questions he
was utterly indifferent. He hated journalists because
they talked about him and poUticians because they did
not. He praised America and things American at a
distance, but American democracy would not have
pleased him. In one sense he was democratic himself;
for a street-sweeper who could draw would have inter
ested him more than a British peer who only patronized
art, "The Master was a Tory," says Mr, Menpes,
"He did not quite know why; but, he said, it seemed to
suggest luxury; and painters, he maintained, should be
surrounded with luxury. He loved kings and queens
and emperors, and had a feeling that his work should
only be bought by royalty." »
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
With reUgion the attitude was about as elementary.
Whistler dreaded death and avoided it and the thought
of it,* He beUeved in a future life and could not under
stand those people who did not,* He even pushed this
beUef as far as spiritualism, took a Uvely interest in
mediums and table-rappings and communications from
the dead. Also, he had been brought up m a strict,
almost Puritanic discipUne, and the Bible had bumed
itself into his memory so that it colored much of his
utterance. But I do not find that religious emotion or
reflection had any large place in his life. He was im
mensely busy in this world and left the next to take
care of itself. God is occasionally mentioned in his
writings, but very rarely, and then with kindness, but
with Uttle interest: "God, always good, though some
times careless." ® In general, his reUgious tone is ad
mirably conveyed by the anecdote of the dinner at
which he listened in unusual silence to an animated
and extensive discussion between representatives of
various sects. At last Lady Burton turned to him
and said, "And what are you, Mr. Whistler?" "I,
madam?" he answered, using the word with which he
would have liked to stop the mouths of aU those who
chattered about his own pursuit in Ufe, "I, madam?
Why, I am an amateur." ^
The same ignorance of the broader thought and
movement of the world very naturaUy permeates
even Whistler's elaborate discussions of his own art.
The theories of the celebrated "Ten O'Clock" lecture,
that art is a casual thing, and cometh and goeth where
it listeth, that the artist happens, that there are no
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
artistic people or periods, and that art has nothing to
do with history, are shrewd, apt, and, as a protest
against pedantry, in many ways just. But they are
incoherent and chaotic, more witty than philosophical,
and more significant of Whistler than of tmth. Above
all, they are intimately related to the wide ignorance
and indifference I have been commenting on. Whistler
made much of his musical analogies. If he had thought
a Uttle more deeply on music, he might have used
another — or he might not. For music is indisputably
and naturally what he always sought to make painting,
the art of ignorance, the art, that is, which appeals
directly to the emotions and does not require for its
appreciation any wide training or experience in history
or the general interests of human Ufe. It is for this
reason that music, even more than painting, seems
destined to become the all-engrossing, all-devouring
art of the future.
And as Whistler was indifferent to human concerns
outside his art in a theoretical way, so he carried the
same indifference into practical action. He lived to
paint, or to talk about painting; all else was pastime,
and most things hardly that. Money? He could some
times drive a hard bargain, but it was a question of
pride in his own work, not of meanness. Otherwise,
money sUpped through his fingers, though in the early
days there was Uttle enough to slip. An artist should
be comfortable, and bills were mundane things. So,
while no one ever disputed his honesty of intention,
he was apt to be in trouble. He was often poor and
knew what privation was. But he never complained,
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
and even when the bailiffs were in his house, he got
gayety and convenience out of them as much as ever
Sheridan did. With time as with money. Exact hours
and art had nothing to do with each other. What was
punctuality? A virtue — or vice — of the bourgeoisie.
If people invited him to dinner, he came when he
pleased and dinner waited. If he invited them to
breakfast at twelve, they might arrive at one and stiU
hear him splashing in his bath behind the folding-
doors.' In all these varied phases of simplicity and so
phistication what strikes me most is a certain child-
Ukeness. The child is a naked man, and in many re
spects so was Whistler. The chUd clue accounts for
many of his oddities and reconciles many of his con
tradictions. He thought some strange things; but
above all, he said and did what he thought, as most of
us do not. Take his infinite delight in his own work.
What artist in any line does not feel it? But some
conceal it more than Whistler. Gazing with rapt adora
tion at one of his pictures, he said to Keppel: "Now,
isn't it beautiful?" "It certainly is," said Keppel.
And Whistler: "No, but isn't it beautiful?" "It is,
indeed," said Keppel. And Whistler again, " raising
his voice to a scream, with a not too wicked blasphemy,
and bringing his hand down upon his knee with a bang
so as to give superlative emphasis to the last word of
his sentence," "  it! isn't it beautiful?" »
The chUd is the centre of his own universe, relates
everything, good and evil, to himself, as does the man
also in his soul. Whistler did it openly, triumphantly.
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
His official biographers declare that they never heard
hun refer to himself in the third person; but they knew
him only in later life and always managed to take a
comparatively academic and decorous view of him.
It is impossible to question Mr. Bacher's account of his
referring to himself as Whistler, though there may be
some exaggeration in it. Not I, but Whistler, did this
or that. You must not find fault with the work or with
the word of Whistler. Or again, it was the Master, as
Mr. Menpes records it for us. " You do not reaUze what
a privflege it is to be able to hand a cheque to the Mas
ter. You should offer it on a rich old EngUsh salver and
in a kingly way." " A good deal of mockery in it, of
course, but an appalling deal of seriousness also. And
note the curious coincidence of this obvious, self-assert
ing, third-personal egotism with the attempt of Henry
Adams to avoid egotism in precisely the same manner.
Everywhere with Whistler there is the intense deter
mination of the child to occupy the centre of the stage,
no matter who is relegated to the wings. There is the
sharp, vivid laugh, the screaming "Ha! Ha!" — a terror
to his enemies, and something of a terror to his friends
also. Not a bit of real merriment in it, but a trumpet
assertion of Whistler's presence and omnipresence.
There is the extraordinary preoccupation with his own
physical personality. In some respects no doubt he
was handsome. A good authority declares that in
youth he must have been "a pocket ApoUo." ^^ At
any rate, to use his pet word, he was always "amazing."
The white lock, whether he came by it by inheritance
or accident, what an ensign it was to blaze out the
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
coming of the Master! Just so Tom Sawyer triumphed
in his deleted front tooth. Read Mr. Menpes's remark
able account of Whistler at the barber's. What a sa
cred function, what a solemn rite, the cult of the lock,
the cult of the Master's personaUty, At the tailor's it
was the same. Every customer was called upon to give
his opinion as to the fit of a coat, and the taflor was
duly impressed with his almost priestly privilege:
"You know, you must not let the Master appear badly
clothed: it is your duty to see that I am well dressed,""
What wonder that Mr, Chesterton affirms, though
unjustly, that "the white lock, the single eye-glass, the
remarkable hat — these were much dearer to him than
any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off.
He could throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious
reason he could not throw off the hat," " Milton was
of the opinion that he who would be a great poet must
make his own Ufe a great poem. Whistler apparently
thought that he who would be a great artist must make
himself a great picture; but the picture he made was
only what he detested most — the word and the thing
— clever. II
A LARGE feature of the Ufe of children is quarreling.
It certainly was a large feature of the Ufe of Whistler.
And we shall best understand his quarrels, if we think
of him as a noisy, nervous, sharp-tongued, insolent
boy. There have been plenty of other artists like him,
alas! He has been compared to Cellini, and justly; and
Vasari's accounts of Renaissance painters abound with
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
rough words and silly or crael deeds that might easily
have been Whistler's, Byron's aristocratic imperti
nences show the same thing in literature, and Heine's
noble and lovable traits were offset by abuse in the
temper of a street ragamuffin.
Whistler liked flattery and adulation as a child does,
and sought them with the candid subtlety which a child
employs for the same object, witness the singular story
of the arts and wiles with which the Master tried to
win the affection of the ignorant fishermen of Saint
Ives — without success."
As he liked compliments, so he resented criticism,
especially if it did not come from a competent source;
and a competent source was too apt to mean one that
took Whistler's preeminence for granted. Criticism,
sometimes reasonable, sometimes ignorant, sometimes
really ill-natured and spiteful, was at the bottom of
most of the riotous disagreements which long made the
artist more conspicuous than his painting did. It is not
necessary to go into the details of all these unpleas
ant squabbles. The names of Ruskin, Wilde, Moore,
Whistler's brother-in-law, Haden, and his patrons,
Eden and Leyland, will sufficiently suggest them.
Sometimes these adventures began with hostility.
Sometimes friendship began them and hostility ended
them. Sometimes Whistler appears madly angry,
actually foaming at the mouth, says one observer, so
that a fleck of foam was to be seen on his tie." Some
times he chuckled and triumphed devilishly, with
punctuations of the fierce and irritating "Ha! Ha!"
Sometimes there was physical violence. Once the
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
artist caught an antagonist washing his face m a club
dressing-room, slipped up behind hun, dashed his head
down into the soapy water, and ran away gleefully,
leaving the enemy to sputter and swear. ^^ Or the
contest was more furious and more doubtful in out
come, as in the rough-and-tumble fights with Haden
and Moore, in which each side asserted the victory.
Of course such doings were disgusting and disgraceful,
no matter how they resulted, and they should have
been forgotten as speedily as might be.
But this was not Whistler's way. Instead, he gloated
over every contest, whether verbal or muscular. He
insulted his enemies and exalted their discomfiture in
print, like a hero of Homer or a conceited boy. He
wrote letter after letter to the papers, always so oblig
ingly ready to help a great man expose himself. Then
he collected the whole mass, including the repUes of
those who had been foolish enough to reply, into "The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies," and flattered himself
that he was a great author as well as a great painter.
Some people think he was. There is no doubt that he
was a master of bitter words. His phrases have a casual
ease of snapping and stinging that often scarifies and
sometimes amazes. From his Puritan training and his
extensive knowledge of the Bible, "that splendid mine
of invective" as he characteristically called it," he
drew a profusion of abuse, which withered, whether
justifiable or not. And occasionaUy he was capable of
great unaginative touches that recaU his pictures.
But in general his writing is vexatious and, to say
the least, undignified, the angry gabble of a gifted smaU
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
boy, who ought to know better. The Wilde corre
spondence is perhaps the worst; but everywhere we get
a tone of cheap railing. There is a careless vigor of
sharp wit, but hardly the vituperative splendor of
Voltaire or Swift. And it is such a small, such a shallow,
such a supersensitive way of taking criticism; no ur
banity, no serenity, no large, sweet, humorous accept
ance of the inevitable chattering folly of the world.
I do not see how any admirer of Whistler's positive
genius can read "The Gentle Art" without sighing
over the pity of it.
The pity of it is rather increased by his evident en
joyment. There was no real hatred at the bottom of
his attacks. Mr. Chesterton insists that he tortured
himself in torturing his enemies. This is rather too
much of a tragic emphasis. He reUeved his nervous
irritability by slashing right and left. But I do not
know that there was much torture in it and there was
a good deal of fun — of a kind, " I have been so abso
lutely occupied, what with working and fighting! —
and you know how I like both,"^* He did like fighting,
and winning — or to make out that he had won. In a
charming phrase he descrUjes himself as "deUcately
contentious." ^* Again, he told the Pennells that "he
could never be ill-natured, only wicked.''^" The dis
tinction is worthy of him, and is no doubt just, though
perhaps not so self-complimentary as he thought it.
Moreover, in aU his fights and quarrels, he liked and
respected — possibly, as Du Maurier insinuates, ^i —
a little dreaded — those who stood up to him and an
swered back. If you dodged and cowered, he would
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
pursue you remorselessly. If you gave him as good
as he sent, he would laugh that shriU "Ha! Ha!" and
let you go, Mark Twain visited him and was looking
over his pictures, "Oh," cried Whistler, "don't touch
that! Don't you see, it is n't dry?" "I don't mind,"
said Mark. " I have gloves on." From that moment
they got along famously. When the artist was painting
Lady Meux, he vexed and bothered and badgered her
past endurance. Finally she snapped out, "See here,
Jimmie Whistler! You keep a civil tongue in that head
of yours, or I will have in some one to finish those por
traits you have made of me," All Whistler could find
to say was, "How dare you? How dare you?" **
Also, his impishness, his strange, fantastic love of
. mischief prompted him to scenes and touches of Aristo-
phanic, MephistopheUan comedy, sometimes laughable
and sometunes repulsive. There is a Renaissance
cruelty about his remark, when told that the architect
who originally designed the Peacock Room had gone
mad on seeing Whistler's alterations, "To be sure,
that is the effect I have upon people," *' There is more
of the ridiculous, but also much of the bitter, in his own
wonderful account of his revenging himself upon Sir
WilUam Eden by spoiling the auction sale of his pic
tures: "I walked into the big room. The auctioneer
was crying 'Going! Going! Thirty shillings! Going!'
'Ha! Ha!' I laughed — not loudly, not boisterously
— it was very deUcately, very neatly done. But the
room was electrified. Some of the henchmen were
there; they grew rigid, afraid to move, afraid to glance
my way out of the corners of their eyes. 'Twenty
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
shillings! Going!' the auctioneer would cry, 'Ha!
Ha!' I would laugh, and things went for nothing and
the henchmen trembled," ^*
Moralizing comment on all these wild dealings and
doings of Whistler is perhaps superfluous and inap
propriate. It would certainly have caused boundless
glee to Whistler himself. Yet one maybe permitted to
point out how easy it is, after all, to be disagreeable and
how little real cleverness it requires. Most of us devote
our best efforts to avoiding instead of achieving it.
And then how often we fail! Even to be disagreeably
witty is not always a triumph of genius. Any tongue
can sting, and the unthinking are always ready enough
to mistake stinging for wit. Much of Whistler's re
corded talk and signed writing irresistibly suggests
Doctor Johnson's saying about Gibber: " Taking from
his conversation aU that he ought not to have said, he
was a poor creature."
It is the same with the gentle art of making enemies.
Most of us require no art for it, being admirably gifted
by nature in that direction. The art of making friends
is the difficult one, especially that of keeping them after
they are made. It is easy to ridicule friendship. A lady
once asked Whistler: "Why have you withered people
and stung them all your Ufe?" He answered: "My
dear, I will tell you a secret. Early in life I made the
discovery that I was charming; and if one is deUghtful,
one has to thrust the world away to keep from being
bored to death." 2* And he dedicated "The Gentle
Art" to "The rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid
Themselves of the Friendship of the Many." The uony
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
is obvious enough, and it is equally obvious that Whis
tler was referring to the casual friendships of the world,
which do not deserve the name. At the same time, the
art, or the gift, or the instinct, of drawing men to you
is worth more, to the artist or the Philistine, than that
of repelling them. In studying Whistler one cannot
but think of such an opposite type as Longfellow, who,
without effort, ahnost without thought, and stiU keep
ing an individuality as sturdy and more manly than
Whistler's, made himself lovable and beloved by every
body. Or, if LongfeUow as an artist is not thought
worthy the comparison, take Raphael, of whom Vasari
teUs us that a power was " accorded to him by Heaven
of bringing all who approached his presence into har
mony, an effect inconceivably surprising in our calling
and contrary to the nature of artists." And again,
" All harsh and evil dispositions became subdued at the
sight of him; every base thought departing from the
mind before his influence. . . , And this happened be
cause he surpassed all in friendly courtesy as weU as in
art." I am incUned to think that such praise would' be
worth more to Whistler's memory a hundred years
hence than "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies."
Ill
So, having got rid of the too abundant negative traits,
let us turn to Whistler's attraction and charm. He was
a man of contradictions, says Mr, Van Dyke; *' and
the frivolous mischief-maker lived side by side with a
thoughtful, eamest, even lofty-souled artist.
The child clue wiU stay with us, as before. Those
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
who knew Whistler best frequently recur to it: "When
off his guard, he was often a pathetic kid," " The
childlike candor rarely failed, not only in asserting
merits, but even in recognizing defects: "He was the
most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever
met, I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought
— nor to try to excuse an action," ^^ And with the
candor in professing opinions went a high and energetic
courage in defending them, a courage that was some
times blatant and tactless, but seems to have been
genuine, even to the point of admitting its own failures.
When Mr. Menpes said to hun, "Of course you don't
know what fear is?" Whistler answered, "Ah, yes!
I do. I should hate, for example, to be standing op
posite a man who was a better shot than I, far away
out in the forest in the bleak, cold early morning.
Fancy I, the Master, standing out in the open as a
target to be shot at!" "
In general human relations it would be a mistake to
suppose that Whistler was always thorny, prickly,
biting and stinging. His biographers insist upon his
gayety.'" Mr. Chesterton denies that he was gay at aU,
and I think Mr. Chesterton must have been right.
Tme gayety not only does not wound, but cannot bear
the thought of having wounded; and such was not
Whistler. Though he chose the butterfly emblem, his
nature had not the butterfly's light and careless satura
tion of sunshine. But it is true that he loved human
society and did not like to be alone, even wanting
people about him when he worked. He could use his
wit to charm and fascinate asweU as to punish, When-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
ever he took part in conversation, he led it and de
served to lead it. Hear this account of his appear
ance in a crowded club-room: "Speaking simply in
a quiet way to myself, without once looking round.
Whistler would draw every man in that club to his
side — smart young men about town, old fogies,
retired soldiers, who had been dozing in arm
chairs," '^ And men not only listened to him, they
loved him — when they did not hate him, "Whistler
could be gentle, sweet, sympathetic, almost feminine,
so lovable was he." '^ He inspired deep attachments,
which could be broken only by the rude knocks that
. he too well knew how to give them. He was gentle
and patient with servants, and there is no better proof
of simple goodness and kindness. *'
For women he seems always to have had a pecuUar
regard, though the records of his relations with them
are naturally not abundant. His Southem training
and habits gave him a rather unusual formal courtesy
toward them and many witnesses insist upon what is
somewhat curious in consideration of his wit and comic
instinct and his distinctly irregular life, that he never
uttered and never tolerated grossness. Two attach
ments to women, at any rate, played a large part in his
career. He adored his mother and obeyed her in his
youth. He adored her and watched over her in his
riper years. Although he resented any critical sugges
tion of sentiment in his portrait of her, he confided to
a friend, speaking very slowly and softly. " Yes — yes
— one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as
possible." '* When he was over fifty, he stumbled upon
102

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
a marriage, fortuitous as most other external events in
his life; but the marriage was singularly happy; he
adored his wife as he had his mother, and her death
shattered hun in a way to confute those who denied
him human tendemess.
When it comes to art. Whistler's admirable qual
ities are questioned by no one. His devotion to it from
youth to age was perfect and unfailing. It was not
perhaps so devouring and morbid a passion as with
some, but it was a constant flame, which bumed stead
ily through all difficulty and aU discouragement. It
was enUghtened and intelligent also, directed from
the beginning with firm and close discipline toward a
definite object. Not that the difficulties and discour
agements did not come. In spite of his confidence
and belief in himseK, there were times, as with all
artists, when things went bitterly, hopelessly wrong:
"No one," says Mr. Gay, "can reaUze, who has not
watched Whistler pauit, the agony his work gave him.
I have seen him after a day's stmggle with a picture,
when things did not go, completely coUapse, as from
an iUness." '* And one should read Mr. Menpes's
strange account of nervous excitement, on the very
eve of an exhibition, over a mouth that was not right
and could not be made right: "He became nervous and
sensitive. The whole exhibition seemed to centre on that
one mouth. It developed into a nightmare. At length,
in despair, he dashed it out with turpentine, and fled
from the gallery just as the first critic was entering." '•
As these efforts and struggles show, no matter how
much Whistler may have attitudmized in Ufe, in art
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
he was sincere and genuine. If you took him quietly
by himself, you could not but feel this. "As a matter
of fact," says Mr. Van Dyke, "he was almost always
in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of
language, talked most sensibly and persuasively," '^
His actions showed sincerity far more than his talk.
Though he was careless about money, spent much of it
and would have liked to spend more, and believed that
he could have done better work if he had had more to
spend, he never sacrificed one line of his ideals for any
earthly payment, "It is better to Uve on bread and
cheese and paint beautiful things than to Uve Uke
Dives and paint pot-boUers," he said; '^ and he meant it
and acted on it always.
Also, he was sincere enough to accept criticism and
profit by it, when it came from a proper source and in
a proper spirit. He once asked a great sculptor what
he thought of a portrait. The sculptor, after some hes
itation, merely pointed out that one leg was longer
than the other. Whistler's friends expected an out
burst. Instead, he remarked quietly: "You are quite
right, I had not observed the fault, and I shaU cor
rect it in the moming." «» Afterward he added, "What
an eye for line a sculptor has!"
And, as he was ready to submit to inteUigent crit
icism of his own painting, so he was equally quick to
acknowledge merit in others, provided it was really
there. He praised the work of students and fellow-
artists with swift and discerning kindness, if it seemed
to him praiseworthy. But pretence and shallow clev-
emess he withered wherever he found them.
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JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
His capacity for labor, for continuous and prolonged
painstaking, was limitless. Because he concealed this
and pretended to work lightly and casually, people
thought him idle, but he was not. Industry, he said,
was an absolute necessity, not a virtue, and a picture,
when finished, should show no trace of the labor that
had produced it: "Work alone will efface the foot-
^eps of work." *" In fact, it Was only in age that he
discovered that he had never done anything but work.
" It struck me that I had never rested, that I had never
done nothing, that it was the one thing I needed." **
He could not tolerate laziness in himself or in others.
In his house there were no armchairs, and to a friend
who complained of this he said, "If you want to rest,
you had better go to bed," " But his friends and pupils
did not want to rest when he was with them. "Whis
tler invariably inspired people to work," says one who
knew him well. *' The sittings for his portraits were
prolonged and repeated, till the sitters' patience was
utterly exhausted, and some of them complained that
the intensity of his effort seemed to draw the very life
out of them. *^ In short, those who judge' him by his
quarrels and his bickerings and his flippancy and his
odd clothes get no idea of the deep, conscientious ear
nestness of the artist. He worked tiU death to produce
beautiful things. A. year before he died, he insisted with
passionate simplicity and sincerity: "I would have done
anything for my art." " To the end he was looking
forward and there are few finer expressions of the ar
dor of creation than his noble" phrase, "an artist's ca
reer always begins to-morrow," "
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
IV
It is not my business to discuss Whistler's art as
such. But as the general's soul is revealed in his bat
tles and the preacher's in his sermons, so in his pic
tures we must seek the painter's, and the biographer
must consider work as well as words.
It appears, then, that in Whistler's art there are
two marked elements which, taken together, help
largely to elucidate his spirit. The first of these is the
element of tmth, precision, exactitude, showing more
conspicuously in the etchings, but never neglected in
any of his work at any time. As he himself said of the
Thames series of etchings: "There, you see, aU is
sacrificed to exactness of outline." "
This instinct of truth, of reality, should be closely
related to the more external facts of Whistler's life.
In combination with the chUdlike simplicity and open
ness, it entered largely into his everlasting quarrels.
He did not quarrel in Paris — that is, not abnormally.
But all the artist in him, all the truth-lover, revolted
against the conventions of English Philistinism, and
he fought them, whether critical or social, with all the
passion that was in him, "The wit of Whistler , . , was
the result of intense personal convictions as to the
lines along which art and life move together," says
one of his most intelligent biographers," As applied
to life, this instinct of truth in him was mainly de
structive, and did little good to him or others; but it
was obscurely lofty in aim and it was an integral part
of his better nature. 106

JAMES McNEILL WHISJL^r
iri art, on the Otter hand, the destmctive instinct
led at once to construction. Here, too, indeed, there
was the perpetual, deadly war on sham. Whistler saw
aU around him, in painting as in poetry, the Victorian
excess of sentiment. The "heart interest" was what
counted and execution was a minor matter. The An-
gelus and "EvangeUne" would make a world-wide
reputation, whether the workmanship was supreme or
not. Against this heresy of the subject Whistler was
in perpetual revolt. He did not sufficiently realize
that a great artist may treat a great subject, though it
too often happens that to the vulgar eye a great subject
may transfigure a mean conception and a vulgar hand
ling. He wanted to shake art free from all these ad
juncts of theme and historical association and his
torical development and concentrate the artist's whole
effort on the pure ecstasy of line and color. He pushed
this so far as to revel in mere decorative richness,
feeding and filling his eye and imagination with the
azure and golden splendors of the Peacock Room,
But, of course, if you had pushed him home, he
would have admitted that in the end all beauty must
be related to human emotion, vague suggestions and
intimations of subtle feeling, all the more overpower
ing because indefinite. And the real purpose of get
ting rid of a distinct, trite subject was to allow these
essential emotions richer play. Music, in which he so
often sought analogy, would have given it to him in
this point also. For the most elaborate orchestral
symphony depends as fundamentally on human emo
tion for its significance as does the simplest air. And
. 107

-AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Bach and Wagner open reahns oi feeling equany deep,
though widely different. The most original and sug
gestive part of Whistler's painting, if not the great
est, is that which enters most into this vast and un
charted region of intangible emotion. Of all things he
loved to paint night, and what in the wide world is
more throbbing with imaginative depths? "Subject,
sentiment, meaning were for him in the night itself —
the night in its loveliness and mystery." **
Here we seize the second cardinal element in Whis
tler's work, the element of mystery. What character
izes his range of vague emotion is not passion, not mel
ancholy, but just the sense of mystery, of the indefin
able, the impalpable. It is singular how all the critics,
whatever theu point of view, unite in distinguishing
this, something vague, something elusive, some hidden,
subtle suggestion which cannot be analyzed or seized
in words. It is naturally more marked in the noc-
tumes and similar paintings, but it is perfectly appre
ciable also in the portraits and in the etchings, the
handling of backgrounds and accessories, the delicate,
evasive gradation of tints and shades. As Huysmans
puts it, " these phantom portraits, which seem to shrink
away, to sink into the wall, with theu enigmatic
eyes." "»
And note that the two elements must work together
to produce theu* full effect. It is the intense impres
sion of definiteness, of clearness, the extraordinary
reaUstic emphasis on one salient point, that doubles
the surrounding suggestion of mystery. In the secret
of making precision, vivid definition, enhance and re-
108

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
double the obscure. Whistler shows his debt to Poe
in an overwhehning degree. But there is another m-
fluence that may have affected Whistler in this re
gard, and that is Russia. I cannot find that any critic
or biographer has suggested this. Yet the artist passed
the most impressionable part of his youth in Russia.
His eyes, his ears, his heart were wide open aUthat time.
Not only Russian painting, but Russian music and
Russian feeling must have passed into them. He must
have touched the Orient there as he did later through
Japan. And surely the essence of Russian art is in
just this union of intense, bald realism with the most
subtle, far-reaching suggestion of the unlimited, the
unexplored, the forever unknown. Russia is childhood
intensely sophisticated. And so was Whistler.
It is curious to reflect that the combination in Whist
ler of the most lucid, direct, energetic intelligence with
the complete general ignorance I have noted earher
led to exactly this result, of the vivid blending of pre
cision with mystery. Clear-sighted and observant as he
was, there is no sense of modern life in him, no portrayal
of the quick, active, current movement of the contem
porary world, no such portrayal of any world. The intel
ligence seems to clarify simply for the purpose of ob
scuring. The total result of the age-long development
of such a magnificent instrument as human reason,
as Whistler illustrates it, is to stultify itself, to show
with blinding flashes the boundless region of impen
etrable shadow. And in this phase of Whistler's art
nothing is more symbolical and suggestive than the
nocturnes with fireworks. The glare of the falUng
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
rocket makes the involvmg darkness oppress you with
a negative visibifity that is maddening.
It is in view of this union of mtense intellectual
clearness with mystery that we must read all Whist
ler's perplexing remarks about nature. Nature was
cmde multiplicity. To the unseeing eye, to the unaided
imagination she would not yield her secret or tell her
story. It was the artist's business and his triumph to
select, to isolate, to emphasize, to coordinate, so as to
suggest the emotion he wished to convey, no other and
no more. Here, again, the parallel of music would have
iUustrated better than any analysis of painting. Every
sound that music uses is given in nature, but given in
a vast and tangled disorder which, to a sensitive ear,
results as often in pain as in pleasure. The musician's
genius brings this chaos into an ordered scheme of
harmonized delight. To Whistler's artistic instinct the
final and perfect triumph of human intelhgence was
the transforming of confusion into mystery.
Many have been puzzled by Whistler's dislike of the
country and even abuse of it. The explanation is sun-
pie. In the first place, he had never lived in the country.
His experience of it was the tourist's, and nature to the
tourist is a mere panoramic display, a succession of
vulgar excitements from an ever higher mountain or
deeper sea. Nature to the tourist is scenery, not feeling.
This is what Whistler meant when he returned from a
visit to the English lakes and said that the mountains
"were aU little round hiUs with Uttle round trees out of
a Noah's ark"; ** when he complained in general that
there were too many trees in the country, and even
110

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
grumbled to a friend, who urged the glory of the stars,
"there's too many of them."" If he had grown up
with an exquisite threshold beauty, such as hovers in
the lovely lines of Cowper, " Scenes that soothed
Or charmed me young, no longer young, I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still,"
his brush would have drawn out the charm as few had
ever done before. But he dwelt in cities. Huge cas
ual doses of nature first surfeited and then starved him.
Moreover, he held, it may be justly, that the deepest
fountains of mystery are not even wide fields and quiet
skies, but the human eye and the human heart.
It is needless to say that the theory of mystery as I
have elaborated it — perhaps too subtly — is not ex-
pUcit in any writing or recorded speech of Whistler
himself. When one has it in mind, however, there is
a curious interest in catching the notes and echoes of
it in his own words. Thus, in practical matters, take his
remark to one who commented on the unfinished con
dition of Whistler's dweUing, "You see, I do not care
for settling down anywhere. Where there is no more
space for improvement, or dreaming about improve
ment, where mystery is in perfect shape, it is finis — the
end — death. There is no hope, nor outlook left." "
Or take the same instinct in a more artistic con
nection, "They talk about the blue skies of Italy, —
the skies of Italy are not blue, they are black. You do
not see blue skies except in HoUand and here, where
you get great white clouds, and then the spaces be
tween are blue! and in Holland there is atmosphere,
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
and that means mystery. There is mystery here, too,
and the people don't want it. What they Uke is when
the east wind blows, when you can look across the
river and count the wires in the canary bud's cage
on the "other side," ** Finally, take the wonderful
words about painting in the twilight, fuU of mystery
and vague suggestion as a poem of Shelley: "As the
light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty
and exacting details vanish; everything trivial dis
appears, and I see things as they are, in great, strong
masses; the buttons are lost, but the garment re
mains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the
sitter is lost, but the shadow remains. And that, night
cannot efface from the pauiter's imagination," " Even
aUowing for the touch of Whistler's natural irony, such a
view of art seems to amend Gautier's celebrated phrase
into "I am a man for whom the invisibleworld exists,"
and to give double emphasis to the hues of Keats,
" Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter."
So we find in Whistler, as we found implicit in Mark
Twain and Sidney Lanier and explicit in Henry Adams,
the immense and overwhelming heritage of ignorance
which the nineteenth century transmitted to the twen
tieth. But whereas Mark erected ignorance into a dog
matic religion of negation, and Adams trifled with it,
and Lanier battled with it. Whistler drew out of it the
enduring solace of artistic effort, and applied to its
persistent torment the immortal, divine recipe for cure
of headache, heartache, soul-ills, body-ills, poverty,
ignominy, contempt, neglect, and pain, the creation, or
even the attempted creation, of things beautiful.

V
JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE

CHRONOLOGY
James Gillespie Blaine.
Born, West Brownsville, Pennsylvania,
January 31, 1830.
Married Harriet Stanwood, June 30, 1850.
Removed to Maine, 1854.
Speaker of Maine House of Representatives,
1861, 1862.
Elected to Congress, 1862.
Speaker of the House of Representatives,
1869-1875.
Mulligan Investigation, 1876.
Senator, 1876-1881.
Secretary of State, 1881.
Nominated for the Presidency, 1884.
Secretary of State, 1889-1892.
Died. January 27, 1893,

^"^BSa^r-liSgi

JAMES G. BLAINE

V
JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE

The best way to get acquainted with Blaine is through
Mrs. Blaine's delightful letters. In the most natural,
most intimate fashion she reflects the whole course of
her distinguished husband's career, by glimpses and,
as it were, afar off, yet with a vividness of suggestion
and comprehension that no formal biography can equal.
And she was a most interesting person herself, a soul
of intense emotion and sympathy, of keen insight, of
playful humor, which sometimes, to be sure, developed
into a pungency of phrase not wholly beneficial to the
mistress of it. She had no love of notoriety, of great
station, oh, no! Yet what she does not want, stings
her, if she misses it; and she writes of Mrs, Cleveland,
"Feminine Frances is spelt with an 'e,' Think of the
fust lady in the land, who is not your chere mere." ^
She does not pretend to influence her husband, oh, no !
Yet the husband declares that "the advice of a sensi
ble woman in matters of statecraft is invaluable," ^
and what charming significance there is in the wife's
quiet remark, "He loves the confessional and the lay
sister (me) — why I do not know, as I always shrive
him out of hand." '
Without making any odious comparisons as to the
male objects, I must say that Mrs. Blaine's letters
115

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
have enabled me to understand Lady Macbeth better
than ever before. There is the same mixture of adora
tion and fathomless pity, of warm motherly domestic
comfort and eager stimulus, with which Lady Macbeth
surveyed, sustained, and prompted her husband's
lofty, if somewhat checkered, career. To be sure, it is
difficult to imagine that Lady Macbeth could have
achieved the following comprehensive eulogy; yet who
can tell? " Those who know him most, love hun best, I
dare to say that he is the best man I have ever known.
Do not misunderstand me, I do not say that he is
the best man that ever Uved, but that of all the men
whom I have thoroughly known, he is the best," * Is
not that a text for meditation through a long summer's
day? It may be fairly said that Blaine's whole life was
poUtical. Even in his Pennsylvania boyhood whiffs of
political passion played around him, and his child let
ters of the forties show more interest in poUtics than
in any other earthly thing. For a short time he taught
in a blind asylum, and the wicked insinuate that he
here became an adept in making the blind see whatever
he wished them to. He married at twenty years of
age, in 1850. He then went to Maine, to edit a paper,
and for the next forty years he and politics were united
so that only death could part them.
Before losing ourselves in the poUtical vortex, how
ever, it will be well to estabUsh thoroughly the general
elements of the man's character on which his public
career was built.
His distinguishing intellectual trait was intense ac-
116

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
tivity. He was a fairly wide and always an acute and
comprehensive reader. He is said to have read Scott's
"Napoleon" before he was eight and all Plutarch be
fore he was nine. If so, it indicates his natural predi
lections. He had a singular power of abstraction in all
mental labor. He did not requue solitude or quiet,
but could read and write and think with the whole
domestic hurly-burly going on about him, and Uked
it. He touched all sorts of subjects Ughtly and vividly,
with illumination, if not penetration, Mrs. Blaine
goes with him to an astronomical observatory, and
when they get home, conunents: Mr. Blaine "demon
strates astronomically that Mars could not have any
moons, and with such a scientific aroma that it would
deceive the very elect, if they did not know that he
does not know, and knows we know that he does
not know anything about it," ^ This suggests, what is
everywhere evident, that, though by no means de
ficient in thoughts, Blaine was on all occasions and in
all connections an ingenious and unfailing master of
words. It would be libelous to say that words were the
whole of him. They were not, ever. But they played
a large part in his life, much larger than he himself
reaUzed, and most of his writing suggests a splendid
faciUty and felicity in words. His letters snap and
sparkle with them. His "Eulogy" on Garfield, which
Senator Hoar rather wildly caUs, "one of the treas
ures of our literature," is at any rate an interesting
specimen of abundant diction as well as of genuine
feeUng. The two bulky volumes of "Twenty Years in
Congress" are ahnost oppressive in a verbal extension
117

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
which tends to obscure their real shrewdness, common
sense, and sanity.
In the same way it is somewhat difficult to get
through the covering of words to Blaine's real feeUng
about the most serious thmgs. When he writes to his
son that "there is no success in this life that is not
founded on virtue and purity, and a religious conse
cration of aU we have to God," * I would not for a mo
ment unply that he did not mean it; but it -did sound
weU, The utter absence m Mrs. Blaine's printed let
ters of aU religious suggestion, both for him and for
her, is very noticeable; but with it we must instantly
place Blaine's own fine reference to "those topics of
personal religion, concerning which noble natures have
an unconquerable reserve." ^ It is certain that he was
zealous in his church membership, taught ui Sunday-
School so as to produce a lasting impression,* and
liked at all times to discuss theology , as to discuss any
thing else. But he was intensely occupied with the
affairs of this world and his daily attitude was quite the
reverse of that of the old Scotchman whose caustic words
he enjoyed putting into the mouth of a theological dis
putant: "I meddle only with the things o' God which
I cannot change, rather than with the things o' man
where I might do harm," '
If practical preoccupations somewhat interfered
with Blaine's religion, they cut him off ahnost entirely
from the deUght of art and beauty. No doubt he talked
about these things, but he had not time to feel them.
When he was first in Europe, he wrote with enthusi
asm of a Rubens picture and Mrs, Blaine mentions
118

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
his interest in picture-buymg. Yet during their long
stay in Florence in the eighties it is remarkable that
her letters, which speak of everything, make no refer
ence whatever to the charm of old painting and sculp
ture, and in Florence too! Poetry he quoted, but
neither read nor cared for. One form of art alone
really took hold of hun. He Uked to bufld houses for
himself and his friends and to set the houses in sur
roundings of exquisite natural beauty. Without having
time to think much of the attractions of the external
world, it is evident that he felt them.
For, if he did not care for art, the cause was lack of
leisure, not lack of feeUng; and his sensibility in all
directions was quick and wide, perhaps profound. Mrs.
Blaine's account of his emotion when writing the Gar
field "Eulogy" is pathetic in the candor of its sym
pathy. After depleting two handkerchiefs, his only
resource was to retire to soUtude.^" Or again, the
sensibility would manifest itself in keen excitement, in
turbid restlessness, in the eager desire to go somewhere,
see somebody, do something. The external man, as
revealed to the pubUc and to superficial observerSj, of
course veiled all this swift unpulse under decorous con
trol. But Mrs. Blaine saw every tWg and tells every
thing, if you know how to listen to her.
Health? Blaine in his later years became morbid
about his health, and at aU times, though he was nat
urally active and vigorous, a threatening, even fan
cied, symptom was enough to distract him from the
most important preoccupations. Even his children
raUied him on the subject. "I am sorry Dr. Barker is
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
coming on," writes Emmons, "for I can already see
father furtively putting new prescriptions in his pocket
and preparing himself for another conflict with mod
em dmgs. Don't let them be alone together for a
moment." " And Mrs. Blaine is delightful in her re
morseless tendemess. Nobody could care more lov
ingly for real, or even for imagined iUs, than she, but
she understands their nature and their significance,
and sets it off with delicate humor, "Your father," she
says, "who always rises to the occasion of an imaginary
perU, wisely skipping the real ones." " Is it a question
of a house? "There is a house there, which he thinks
would build up his health — argument with him irre
sistible." " Is it a question of an agent? " A very swell-
looking young man, with dyspepsia powders, which he
says are the daily food of Aldrich, Hiscock, and other
great men. I see a generous box of them lying on the
table." " And for all her love and for aU her sympathy,
there are moments when even her patience wavers a
Uttle. "Hunself is surely improving, and were he
other than the chUd of genius would probably not know
there was anything the matter with hun."" Agam:
" And with these prodigious powers, the chinmey corner
and speculation on his own physical condition are all
that he aUows hunself. . , . This is one of the days
when I am not in sympathy with disease," "
With such extreme sensibility and such proneness to
imagine good and ill fortune of all kinds, it was to be
expected that Blaine would be a man of the most mer
curial disposition, Uable to be unduly depressed or
exalted. It is fascinating to watch the reflection of
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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
this tendency in the unconscious intimate record of his
best beloved. Who better than she could indicate " an
abasement of soul and an abandonment of hope, such
as those only know who have been fed and nurtured on
political aspirations and convictions"? " Agaui, she
could suggest with a quiet touch the intense reaction,
the eager burst of living, that was thrown into the most
trivial pursuit when mounting spirits put all care and
doubt behind them: "Two days of coupe, shopping
(and — shall I say it without danger of being misun
derstood? — your Father), reconcile me to home and
a new departure," ^^ While the unmediate contrast has
rarely been better drawn than in her vivid account
of two morning greetings: " '0 Mother, Mother
Blaine, I have so much to do, I know not which way
to turn.' 'Good!' said I. 'Yes,' said he, 'isn't it per
fectly splendid?' A very different cry from the 'O
Mother, Mother Blaine, tell me what is the matter
with me!' which has so often assailed my earliest wak
ing ear, and which always makes my very soul die
within me." "
Among the various real and fancied grounds of
depression, nothing, unless considerations of his own
health, affected Blaine more than considerations of
his wife's. When she is iU, even not seriously, he can
cels aU his political engagements, and remains at her
bedside, perturbed to excess, and causmg more dis
comfort than he reUeves. "In my room he sat on my
bed or creaked across the floor from corner to comer
by the hour, making me feel a guilty wretch to cause
him so much misery. He is a dear, dear old feUow." '^
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
For his family was dear to him as he was to them, and
no picture of him could be complete which did not show
his charm and infinite affection in the deUghtful atmos
phere of home. His children he always speaks of with
thoughtful tenderness and he not only watched over
them but enjoyed them. Not many busy fathers, how
ever loving, could have made and meant the apt reply,
when asked "How can you write with these children
here?" " It is because they are here that I can write." *^
And he could do more than attend to his deepest con
cerns in their presence. He could and did do what is
perhaps even more difficult, take them into his counsels
and discuss large matters of thought and profound ques
tions of state with intimate freedom at his own fire
side, thus making it, his biographer says, "the happiest
fireside in the world." ^^
As for Mrs. Blaine, his tendemess for her is written
all over his life and hers. It is not to be supposed that
such high-mettled natures could pass long years together
entirely without friction. And the husband occasion
ally mdulges in the chaffmg criticism which rather ex
presses tendemess than dulls it, " I drove the pair, my
wife rode; she is not generally driven, but in family
arrangements she more commonly drives." ^' Or di
rectly to her, after describing a swift rush of occupa
tions and preoccupations: "Now, was n't this making
the most of a day? Had it been you, you would have
sat down and cried." '^* But the depth and perma
nence of the tenderness are everywhere felt, even when
not uttered, and they are manifested by the constant
need and constant appeal far more than could be done
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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
by any power of language. The most exquisite witness
to them is their reflection in Mrs. Blaine's own letters.
"So much of Ufe and so much love," she says of her
family, "do not often go together." *" And I do not
know where to find summed up in briefer, more expres
sive words the typical attitude of a devoted wife toward
an affectionate husband than in the following phrase :
"I miss his unvarying attention, and as constant
neglect." ^^
When it came to enlarging regard beyond the family
circle, Blaine, Uke most busy men with happy homes,
does not appear to have had any very intimate friends,
at least in later Ufe, But the list of those who were
deeply attached to him is long and his unswerving
loyalty to all of them is unquestioned. As to his general
social quaUties, it is evident that he was bom to mix
with men, to please them, and to succeed with them.
He Uked his fellows; did not like to be alone, but more
than that, really liked to be with others, and there is
an important difference between the two instincts.
Yet, though he enjoyed society and sought it and liked
to play a promuient part in it, he was always simple
and natural, always himself, Mrs. Blaine catches this
inunitably, as usual: "Your Father, with that inde
pendence of criticism which makes him so delightful
and surprismg a comrade." " He even cairied artless
candor to the point of abstraction, was careless about
his appearance, careless about his clothes, would sit
in a merry company entirely lost and absorbed in
thought. Then he would return to himself, insist that
he had not been absent, and with incomparable spirit
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
and vivacity make up for any absence by a presence
that, though never obtmsive, was all-pervading and
triumphant. When we sum up this social attraction in Senator
Hoar's reference to "the marvelous personal charm of
his delightful and gracious manners," "* we are pre
pared to understand something of Blaine's promuient
place in the political life of his time.
II
For, whatever else he was, and no matter what his
achievement in other lines, he was always, by common
consent, a consummate politician. He could sway great
masses of men by his personality as few leaders in
American history have been able to do, "Mr. Blaine
was certainly the most fascinating man I have ever
known in politics," says Andrew D. White. "No won
der that so many Republicans in aU parts of the country
seemed ready to give their Uves to elect him." ^^ To
be sure, he had enemies as weU as friends, and both
were ardent. "There has probably never been a man
in our history upon whom so few people looked with
indifference," says Senator Hoar. "He was bom to be
loved or hated. Nobody occupied a middle ground as
to him." *" Yet even his enemies felt it difficult to re
sist his charm. On one occasion, when his name was
mentioned at a great Democratic meeting, the whole
audience rose in applause. '* After he had made some
rather uritating decision as Speaker, one Democrat
was heard to say privately to another, "Now there's
Blaine — but, damn him, I do love him," *" In his later
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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
years, when he was campaigning for others rather than
for himself, he was everywhere received with what
John Hay called " a fury of affection," '»
Something in his appearance must have charmed
people. As we look at his portraits to-day, it is not quite
easy to say what this was. Indeed, in some of them
there is a look about the eyes that repels. But there
must have been ui his manner and bearing a spirit,
a vivacity, an instant response to all minds and tempers
that does not get into the portraits.
At any rate, the charm was there, and was irre
sistible; and one, searches curiously to find out the
causes of it. It was effective with individuals, taken
singly. And here it seems to lie largely in a subtle and
instant understanding. Blaine loved to probe men's
characters. He was immensely attentive to what others
were saying and thinkuig and doing. "Your Father,
whose quick ear catches everything that is said,"
observes his most loving critic. ** He not only caught
what was said, but he interpreted it, put two and two
and ten and ten together, and built men's minds out
of their common, careless actions. And as he understood,
so he sympathized, showed others that he thought
and also felt as they did. One of his old pupils said of
his early days of teaching that when boys came to
confess to hun, he knew what they had to say before
they spoke.*'' It was always so. He came among the
people and stepped right into their Uves, "Wherever
man earns his daily bread by the sweat of his brow,
there Mr, Blaine enters, and is ever welcome," said
one of his neighbors." There was some policy in this
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
undoubtedly; but there was also some love. It is im
possible to dispute the admirable verdict of his bi
ographer, "He had a passion for human happiness," "
And it was a real passion, not a whim or fancy: life
and his political pursuits were to him always a serious
matter. He had plenty of jesting at his command,
plenty of easy gayety. But he was never disposed
to take ambition or success or the achievement of
great public objects after the fashion of Seward, as an
exciting game, or a neatly fashioned and highly fin
ished work of art. He moved the souls of others be
cause their souls and their welfare and theu hopes
moved hun.
Also, he not only understood and felt, but he remem
bered, and it is impossible to overestunate the value of
this gift in dealing with men. He would meet a man
whom he had not seen for twenty years and recall
little details of their last interview. He would shake
hands with the old farmers and remember their white
horses and the clever trades they made, "How in
the world did he know I had a sister Mary, who married
a Jones?" said one fellow, and went and voted for
him.'* He professed that the memory was instinctive,
and when asked, "How can you remember so?" an
swered, "How can you help it?" '» But he knew well
enough that there was effort and attention in it; and
attention, as Chesterfield said, is the foundation of
courtesy. One day a carriage drove up. " I suspect that
carriage is coining for you," said a friend. "Yes," said
Blaine, " but that is not the point. The point is that
there is a man on that front seat whom I have not seen
126

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
for twenty-seven years, and I have got just two minutes
and a half to remember his name in." *" He remem
bered it.
Probably aU these things together make what we
caU magnetism. It is interesting to hear Blaine's own
opinion of this quaUty, as embodied in some one else.
"What precisely is meant by magnetism it might be
difficult to define, but it is undoubtedly tme that
Mr, Burlmgame possessed a great reserve of that sub
tile, forceful, overwhehning power which the word
magnetism is used to signify," " Few men have pos
sessed more of it than Blaine,
As it attracted individuals, so it appealed to vast
masses, who never came into direct contact with him
at all. He was not a great orator. But he never said
too much and what he did say, told. He was wonder
fully quick at retort, rarely let a critic or questioner
get the best of him. He was energetic and straight
forward. His reputation in politics leads you to ex
pect rhetoric in his speeches. But it is not there, or
rarely. Instead, there is quick and telling common sense.
And he was simple, spontaneous, appeared to speak
and did speak direct from the heart, often with imme
diate and profound emotion. For it is characteristic of
the man, and accounts for much of his success, that he
combined impulse and passion with a singular degree
of far-reaching foresight and control.
It was this divination and foresight, even more than
his gift of speech, that enabled him to hold and guide
the masses. He was a natural leader; not merely in the
organizing sense, for he often left organizing to others;
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
but, as Senator Hoar says, he touched the people be
cause he was like the people. " He saw and foresaw
the issues that would animate and the right moment
for introducing them; and he knew how to give them
the form that clutched men's hearts.
No man has ever understood better the value as
weU as the defects of the American party system.
His friends and his enemies were usually those of his
party. He may perhaps have been inclined to favor
and reward the former unduly, and it cannot be de
nied that he sometunes feU into extremes of parti
san and personal bittemess of the sort that drove his
wife to exclaim, "I hate to hate, but I am in dan
ger of that feeUng now,"" But for the most part
his grudges were laid aside as readily as they were
adopted and he viewed political machinery merely as
a superb agency to accomplish a particular end.
His standing as a politician, then, no one can dis
pute. Moreover, it is universally admitted that he
was a remarkably quick, effective, and, on the whole,
fair presiding officer, in the legislature and in Congress.
Was he a great statesman? On one side of statesman
ship, that of slow, careful, matured, solid constmc-
tion, he seems to have accomplished little. His name
is widely identified with a protective tariff and he
spoke and worked for it all his life; but he was not
connected with any actual tariff measure, unless the
reciprocity element in the McKinley BiU, As secretary
of state in 1881 and again, under Harrison, from 1889
to 1892, he dealt with various large questions of di
plomacy. His action was always clear, incisive, and
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JAIVIES GILLESPIE BLAINE
vigorous. His logic was usually reasonable and his
aims patriotic. But one of his most judicious advo
cates speaks of his "failure in tact as a diplomatist"
and admits that he was a little too prone to carry the
methods of congressional debate into the sedater sphere
of diplomacy. ** And General Sherman, a connection
and warm friend, says, referring to his executive abU-
ity, "His qualities are Uterary, not administrative.
... I would not choose Blaine to command a reg
iment or frigate in battle. Many an inferior man would
do this better than he," "
On the other hand, in what may be called the imag
inative side of statesmanship, Blaine was admirable.
His mind lived in and with large ideas. He looked for
ward, far forward, as Seward did, and built ample,
confident projects in the days to come. His discus
sions of difficult questions were almost always sane,
simple, reasonable. Take, for instance, his speech on
the Irish problem, at Portland, in 1886, The subject
was as thorny then as it is to-day, and I do not know who
has handled it with more discretion, moderation, and
tme wisdom than Blaine did. An even larger and more
important matter was the question of Pan-America.
Blaine's conception of this was far in advance of his
own tune, and his treatment of it, both in planning
the Peace Congress and afterwards in guiding it, was
enUghtened and enlightening. I do not know what can
be added to Mr. Root's admirable remark that Blaine
had "that imagination which enlarges the historian's
understanding of the past into the statesman's com
prehension of the future." "
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
On the whole, most persons not blinded by party
prejudice wiU to-day, I think, agree with Senator
Hoar that Blaine would have made a satisfactory pres
ident, unless as they take exception to his financial
career, III
From his youth Blaine had a natural taste for busi
ness and the world of money. None of his biographers
elucidates very thoroughly the transition from the poor
teacher to the comfortably situated, if not wealthy,
editor who at an early age threw himself into politics.
But it is evident that at all times he had an instinct
for speculative investments, liked the excitement of
them, and needed the money. Also, in business as in
politics, his taste was rather for large conception than
for the slow and methodical handUng of detail. One
of Mrs. Blaine's delightful sentences tells, or suggests,
aU we need to know on this head (itaUcs mine):
"My dearer self — and certainly he might apply the
title with another significance to me — is looking up
his sadly neglected stocks — AU that fine Fortunatus's
purse which we once held the strings of, and in which
we had only to insert the finger to pay therewith for
the house, has melted from the grasp which too carelessly
held it." "
And the money melted not only from careless man
agement, but from direct expenditure. Blame was
always ready to give, always charitable. No appeal
was made to him in vain. Hear another of Mrs, Blaine's
quick comments on charity and business: "Father had
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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
made up his mind this moming to give five hundred
dollars to the Old Ladies' Home, and it looks like a
slap in the face from Providence to find things going
the wrong way in the aftemoon," ^« Naturally the
outgo for personal Uving was not less in proportion.
Mrs, Blaine managed as best she could; but to bring
up six children in the expensive atmosphere of Wash
ington cost money, and it was unpossible to elude the
fact or to forget it.
The pressure, the financial stringency, are every
where evident, Mrs, Blaine's inimitable candor
pushes through all her sense of decorum, "A great
fanuly are we, so far as the circulation of money is con
cerned. To-night we are very nearly square with the
world," *^ Again, with as near to a reflection upon
"the best man she ever knew thoroughly" as she can
permit herseU: "I have drawn so much money this
month, how can any one who never listens to or enters
into a detaU, understand it?" ^^ And Blaine's own
dry, vivid echo fully confirms her distresses: "I do not
really know which way to turn for relief, I am so pressed
and hampered, , , . Personally and pecuniarily, I am
laboring under the most fearful embarrassments." "
To which he adds elsewhere this telling figure: "If I
had the money myself, I would be glad to advance it
to you, but I am as dry as a contribution-box." ^^
Of course this was not a constant condition. Things
looked up as well as down. But money poured out,
was always needed, and, as is the inconvenient nature
of money, it had to come from somewhere. During
the later skties, both before and after he was estab-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
lished in Congress, Blaine became involved in com
plicated financial transactions with a certain Warren
Fisher, Jr., with whom he had become acquainted when
Fisher was connected with Blaine's brother-in-law.
At Fisher's instance Blaine agreed to dispose of a large
amount of first-mortgage bonds of the Little Rock and
Fort Smith Railroad to his friends in Maine, The bonds
normally carried with them to the purchaser a con
siderable amount of land-grant bonds and stock;
but in this case these, together with other first-mort
gage bonds, were to go — privately — to Blaine as a
commission. This transaction in itself appears far from
creditable, but Blaine doubtless held that he was con-
ferruig a favor and deserved to be remunerated for
his time and trouble. The investment did not turn
out successfully. The Little Rock bonds f eU, and Blaine
felt himseff obliged in honor — and policy — to pro
tect his friends. About this time a considerable number
of Little Rock bonds were sold to the Atlantic and
Pacific and to the Union Pacific roads at a price
largely in advance of the market. It was never shown
that these bonds came from Blaine and he was able to
advance specific evidence to the contrary. But much
suspicion attached to him and in the mmds of many it
was never thoroughly removed. Also, there were other
dealings with Fisher, more or less unsavory.
The implication through it aU, of course, was that
Blaine was traduig on his great office as speaker of the
House of Representatives and his opportunity to
favor the railroads. No corrupt act was ever directly
and clearly proved against him. But various passages
132

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
in his letters to Fisher seemed to make the charge
plausible. Shortly before taking the Little Rock bonds,
Blaine had made a ruling in the House, of importance
to the road. In a letter, written some time later, he
points out that, while doing his plain duty, he had con
ferred on his new associates a considerable benefit. "
In another letter, of earlier date, he observes, "I do
not feel that I shall prove a deadhead in the enterprise,
if I once embark in it. I see various channels in which
I know I can be useful." ** These phrases are certainly
not conclusive; but they are damaging. They are not
made less so by a sentence in one of Fisher's letters to
Blaine: "Owing to your political position, you were
able to work off all your bonds at a very high price;
and the fact is well known to others as well as myself." "
This charge Blaine received almost cruigingly and with
no denial whatever.
From the time when the unpleasant matter was first
stirred up, not long before the presidential nomina
tion of 1876, Blame's course about it was thoroughly
unsatisfactory. He made weU-sounding speeches in
the House, which convinced all those who were con
vinced already. But to any careful scrutiny it was ev
ident that he shuffled and prevaricated, contradicted
himself, and used every effort to conceal what in the
end could not be concealed. He declared publicly that
the very attempt to cover up an action condemns it;
yet he urged upon Fisher the closest secrecy, "Bum
this letter," or words to that effect, was a common
phrase with him, " It was perhaps a natural one, but
it fitted the Fisher letters too well. In the crisis of
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
his difficulties he wrote to Fisher enclosmg a letter
which Fisher was to write to hun, exonerating him from
aU blame. The document is more ingenious than in
genuous, and it is not pleasant to see a man in such a
situation dictating about himself a sentence Uke the
following: "When the original enterprise failed, I knew
with what severity the pecuniary loss feU upon you,
and with what integrity and nerve you met it," "
The reader will ask curiously how aU these very pri
vate letters of Blaine's came into the evidence. The
answer involves not the least disagreeable part of the
whole affair. The congressional committee, which in
vestigated the matter in the spring of 1876, caUed be
fore it one Mulligan, who had been in the employ of
Fisher. Mulligan had possession of the Blaine corre
spondence and proposed to produce it. This annoyed
Blaine greatly. He had an interview with Mulligan
and, according to the latter, entreated him to return
the letters, resorting to suggestions of briberj'^ and to
threats of suicide. All this Blaine insisted was utterly
false. What is indisputable is that he got the letters into
his hands, with at least the implied promise to restore
them, and then cahnly put them in his pocket and
walked off with them, urging that they were his own
private property.
As a climax of the MuUigan business, Blaine read
the letters in the House in the order and with the com
ments that suited him. He ended his speech charac
teristically by turning on the investigating committee
and accusing them of suppressing, for partisan pur
poses, evidence that they knew would completely clear
134

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
him. The attack was unjustified and, with Blaine's
knowledge of the facts, discreditable; but for the mo
ment it was immensely telling, and shortly after, as a
consequence of the sudden Ulness which helped to pre
vent Blaine from being nominated, the immediate
investigation was dropped. The infection of it, how
ever, tainted his whole career.
What interests us far more than what Blaine ac
tually did is his own attitude toward his own actions.
We may assume with entire confidence that he did not
for a moment admit to himself that he had done any
thing wrong. We have not only Mrs. Blaine's partic
ular, triumphant, if perhaps somewhat prejudiced,
assertion that he was the best man she ever knew thor
oughly, but we have the general facts of human nature.
An acute observer teUs us that "One has always the
support of one's conscience, even when one commits
the worst infamies. In fact, that is precisely what en
ables us to commit them." The dullest of human spir
its is inexhaustible in finding excuses for its own con
duct, and Blaine, far from being the dullest, was one
of the most brilUant.
Therefore I believe he was perfectly sincere when he
declared upon the floor of the House, " I have never
done anything in my public career for which I could be
put to the faintest blush in any presence, or for which
I cannot answer to my constituents, my conscience,
and the great Searcher of Hearts." ^* These are tre
mendous phrases. Perhaps no Uving man could utter
them with entire honesty, and they show the fatal,
delusive power of words, for then master — and their
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
victim. Yet I have no doubt Blaine meant them.
Beyond question he meant the far more impressive
words, spoken in privacy, with obviously genuine
emotion: "When I think — when I think — that there
Uves in this broad land one smgle human being who
doubts my integrity, I would rather have stayed — " *'
There he stopped, but his gesture showed his ear
nestness. It is intensely curious to turn from these statements
to the pamphlet issued in 1884 by the Committee of One
Hundred and see the explicit analysis of what appear to
be Blaine's six deliberate falsehoods. The thoughtful
reader, who has a human heart himself, will manage
to divine how Blaine explained each one of these. But
it required a considerable amount of ingenuity.
Unquestionably he even excused to himself the com
pUcated course of shuffUng and concealment by which
he endeavored to hide aU his proceedings from the
beginning. These were his own private concerns, he
argued, long past and buried. The public had not
conceivable business with them and he was perfectly
justified in making every possible effort to put the
public off the scent.
Yet, as we look back at the affair, this seems to have
been his worst mistake. If at the very start he had come
out with perfect candor, told the story of the whole
transaction, even in its most unfortunate features,
admitted that he had blundered and had been foolish
as weU as apparently culpable, he might have stormed
the country. For the American people and all humanity
love nothing better than a man who acknowledges his
136

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
faults, and this is the hardest of all lessons for a poli
tician to learn, Blaine never learned it.
As to the business morality of what he did, it is of
course difficult to pass a complete judgment on it,
because we never shaU know all the facts. But it must
be remembered that in the late sixties speculation in
railroads was a mania that affected most business men
more or less, Lowell, who was by no means friendly to
Blaine, wrote: "I suspect that few of our Boston men
who have had to do with Westem railways have been
more scrupulous." *" Further, it must especially be
remembered that in all his long career after 1872 no
suspicion of anything corrupt really attached to Blaine,
although he was always interested in speculative in
vestments. Moreover, the bitter partisan animosity
that was aroused against him must always be taken
into account. The most honest of the Mugwumps did
not hesitate to exaggerate well-grounded suspicion into
fantastic prejudice. Even Mr, Rhodes, sanest and
most patient of judges, who in his eighth volume is,
I think, somewhat too favorable to Blaine's states
manship, speaks in volume seven of his "itching
pahn," " Now Blaine's palm never itched with greed.
It was only slippery with liberality.
Blaine's fundamental error was when, as a great
political officer of the government, he engaged in dubi
ous speculation. Senator Hoar, who admires him and
exonerates hun from aU wrong-doing, yet insists that
"members of legislative bodies, especially great polit
ical leaders of large influence, ought to be careful to
keep a thousand miles off from relations which may
137

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
give rise to even a suspicion of wrong," «* Blame was
squarely in the midst of such thmgs and not any
miles off at all. His biographer tells us that one of his
favorite maxims was, "Nothing is so weakening as
regret." " He regretted his deaUngs with Fisher, how
ever, and spoke of them as "this most unfortunate
transaction of my Ufe, pecuniarily and otherwise." **
He had reason to, for they cost him the presidency.
IV
And the presidency may justly be regarded as the
goal of his existence. There has been much argument
about his own personal ambition. The biographers do
not emphasize this element in him, but rather uisist
that, especially in later years, he became utterly in
different to political advancement and so, repeatedly,
expressed himself. No doubt he did so express himseff.
No doubt, after his defeat in 1884, he behaved with the
utmost dignity in avoiding any insistent appeal for
popular favor and in declining to have his name tossed
about like a straw in the gusts of partisan debate.
But those who stress this attitude too much forget that
an imaginative man may perfectly well combine a pas
sionate desire for a thing with a philosophical sense of
its worthlessness, AU through Blaine's career I catch
gleams of intense ambition, like the brief reference to
the Representatives' HaU m Maine: "That was the
theatre of a great deal of early pride and power to the
undersigned. It never covered the horizon of my hopes
and ambitions, but while in it and of it I worked as
though there was no other theatre of action in the
138

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
world." " And when I read Mrs, Blaine's admirable
sentence, written in 1881, "Your Father said to me
only yesterday, 'I am just like Jamie — when I want a
thing, I want it dreadfuUy.' " " I have no difficulty
in understanding Mr. Stanwood's picture of him, after
he had resigned his secretaryship of state in 1892,
shutting himseff up in a Boston hotel, to follow
with passionate eagerness the reports of the Conven
tion where his chance of touching the climax of his
fate was sUpping away forever. ^^
For, no matter what view one takes of Blaine's con
scious, personal ambition, it cannot be denied that
the total logic of his career bore him toward the pres
idency with a tremendous, long, unceasing sweep. He
rose upward and onward through the course of state
politics, through the larger world at Washington, suc
ceeding everywhere and in everything, gaining friends
and supporters and admirers. It seemed in 1876 as
if the nomination must be his. Then the phantom of
the fatal Fisher stalked in and thrust hun out. It was
the same in 1880. When 1884 came, the pressure of
his immense popularity was too great to be resisted
and the convention was forced to nominate him. The
campaign that followed was one of the fiercest, the
most exciting, the most personal in American history.
It was also one of the closest. To the end no one could
teU or foretell. The incident of the over-zealous Rev
erend Burchard, who declared that his adored Blaine
was the deadly enemy of "Rum, Romanism, and Re-
belUon," may have affected only a few votes. But a
few in New York were enough, so few that some con-
139

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
tended that a dishonest count in a district here and
there was sufficient to change the result. Yet, if it
had not been for the defection of those who dis-
tmsted Blaine's financial character, a dozen Burchards
could hardly have made a ripple on the wave of his
immense majority.
Unfortunately we have little light on Blaine's in
ner Iffe during the contest. Almost his last public
words before the vote were, " I go to my home to-mor
row, not without a strong confidence in the result of the
ballot, but with a heart that shaU not in the least de
gree be troubled by any verdict that may be returned
by the American people." " The shall is fine. But
how such words wither before the vivid humanity of
Mrs. Blame's description: "It is all a horror to me.
I was absolutely certain of the election, as I had a
right to be from Mr. Elkins's assertions. Then the fluc
tuations were so tryuig to the nerves. It is easy to bear
now, but the click-cUck of the telegraph, the shouting
through the telephone in response to its never-to-be-
satisfied demand, and the unceasing murmur of men's
voices, coming up through the night to my room, wiU
never go out of my memory — while over and above
all, the perspiration and chiUs, into which the con
flicting reports constantly threw the physical part of
one, body and soul aUke rebeUing against the re
straints of nature, made an experience not to be volun
tarily recalled." *'
There is nothing to be said after that. For Blaine
it was the end, though the end lasted for nearly ten
years of Ungering and superficially varied activity.
140

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
After the bittemess of such an hour, what was there in
Ufe? You might preserve a decent outside, of courage,
of dignity, of serenity, even of ardor and enthusiasm.
Underneath there was nothing. You could nurse your
pet symptoms of disease, you could turn an honest
dollar in the stock market, you could trifle afar off
and with no indecent coquetry with the presidential
bauble, you could be a paltry secretary of state with
much credit and some friction, you could see those you
loved best dying about you, and, thank God, you
could die yourself.
Such was the great moral tragedy of James Gil
lespie Blaine. With pretty much aU the virtues, all
the graces, all the gifts of genius, he will be remem
bered in his country's annals as the man who lost the
presidency because he was suspected of fmancial dis
honor.

VI
GROVER CLEVELAND

CHRONOLOGY
Stephen Grover Cleveland.
Born, Caldwell, New Jersey, March 18, 1837.
Clerk in grocery-store, Fayetteville, New York,
1851.
Removed to Buffalo, New York, 1854.
Admitted to the bar. May, 1859.
Elected Mayor of Buffalo, 1881.
Elected Governor of New York, 1882.
Elected President of the United States, 1884.
Married Frances Folsom, June 2, 1886.
Elected President of the United States, 1892.
Died, Princeton, New Jersey, June 24, 1908.

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GROVER CLEVELAND
VI
GROVER CLEVELAND

What a comfort it is to find a statesman who did
not succeed ny his tongue! No doubt many statesmen
have admirable qualities that go a little deeper; but
there are so few for whom the tongue does not open
the way that gives the other quaUties a chance! It
was not the tongue with Cleveland, at any rate. What
was it? Some say, or used to say, largely a curious con
catenation of favorable cucumstances. But this ex
plains nothing, and a careful study of his character
and Ufe will make it appear otherwise.
The astounding rapidity of Cleveland's advance in
the world does seem to favor the theory of accident.
The son of a poor country minister, he had to make
his way, and made it. He began to earn his Uving as
a boy in a grocery-store, in Fayette viUe, New York.
Oddly enough, like his great rival, Blaine, he later held
a position in a bUnd asylum. Afterwards he found en
trance into a lawyer's office and by unmense indus
try graduaUy established a soUd practice. He was dis
trict attorney and shenff of Erie County, but not ex
ceptionally active or prominent in politics. Then, in
1881, at the age of forty-four, he became mayor of
Buffalo, ui 1882 governor of New York, in 1884 pres
ident of the United States, in 1892 president for a sec-
145

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
ond terra. Is it strange that when he was first in the
White House he should have said, "Sometunes I wake
at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not aU a
dream?" ^
How far was personal ambition a driving force in
this extraordinary progress? If you will Usten to
Cleveland's eulogists, you wiU think it was mainly
absent. Accoiding to them it would appear that great
office called for such a man as he was and he compUed
with the demand much against his good nature. It
needs but little knowledge of the human heart to find
this view somewhat exaggerated. Men may distrust
their own abiUty. They may weary of public cares and
burdens. But few men have high dignity actually
thrust upon them, I have no doubt that Cleveland
liked to be governor, liked to be president, especially
reUshed aU his Ufe the grandeur of having filled those
offices. This does not mean that there was any untmth in
his statement that " I never sought an office of any kind
in my Ufe." ^ It does not mean that he would have
sacrificed one grain of self-respect to gain any office.
As dignities came to him, he accepted and enjoyed the
honor of them; but what they brought chiefly was duty.
He set himself earnestly, strenuously to fuffil that duty,
and the task was so absorbing that he hardly perceived
the necessary result of such fulfihnent in another step
outward and upward. When the presidential nomi
nation came to him in 1884, he was occupied with his
gubernatorial duties at Albany. Naturally he had di
vined what was coming, or others had obUguigly divuied
146

GROVER CLEVELAND
it for him. But neither the nomination nor the cam
paign distracted him for a moment from his regular
work. He stayed ui his office and let others do the talk
ing, or, if they talked too loudly around him, he went
off for a day's fishing and forgot them. The campaign
was ugly, saturated with abuse and scandal. He paid no
attention. TeU the tmth, he urged, and take the con
sequences. He appeared so Uttle before the campaign
ing crowds that the sight of a great, surging, triumphant
assembly was nearly too much for him. In an ahnost
broken voice he said: "I never before realized what was
expressed in the phrase 'a sea of faces' — look at it;
as beautfful and yet as terrible as the waves of the
ocean." "
The honest earnestness of his attitude through it aU
shows in nothing better than in his way of receiving the
news of his nomination. As he sat working in his office,
firing was heard outside. "They are firing a salute.
Governor, over your nomination," said General Fams-
worth. "That 's what it means," added Colonel Lament.
"Do you thmk so?" said the governor quietly. "Well,"
he continued, "anyhow, we'U finish up this work."*
That was the man. Whatever happens, life or death,
we'U finish up this work. II
With so much work and so Uttle taUt, it was natural
that the country should not have known a great deal
about the man it had elected president. It never did know
him. It has only begun to know him since his death. Even
to-day it is difficult to penetrate beneath the apparent
147

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
stolidity, the calm, unshaken, impersonal reserve, to the
warm, human soul. And we have no such charming,
indiscreet confidences as lurk and linger in the letters
of Mrs. Blaine. But there was a human soul there,
just the same.
There was intelligence, solid, substantial, reliable, if
not broad. Early opportunities of education there had
not been. The fierce necessities of bread and butter
cut them off, and they were always deeply, perhaps
excessively, regretted. There are some evidences of des
ultory reading, for instance a rather surprising reference
to Sterne," and an out-of-the-way quotation from "Troi-
lus and Cressida." « But in the main large culture was
not the foundation of Cleveland's thought or life.
Nor was the lack of cultivation supplemented, as so
often, by quickness or alertness of intelUgence. Some
men appear learned, and even are learned, by seizing
the end of a thread here, another there, and patching aU
together into a respectable fabric of wide conversance.
This process was foreign to Cleveland's nature. He
did not generaUze, did not move readily and swfftly
among abstract ideas, did not sprmg instantly to the
far-reaching significance of the immediate. It is tme,
we have a most interesting saying of his, "I can never
understand the meaning of any theory untU I know
how it happened." ^ But this implied apparently rather
the lawyer's close and curious search for precedent than
the scientist's ample reach into the infinite relations of
things. On the other hand, ff the intelligence was not swift
or restless, it was vigorous, thorough, and exact. Once
148

GROVER CLEVELAND
a problem was fairly stated, it had to be solved, and it
had to be solved rightly. I cannot make this clearer than
by quoting a most discerning account of Cleveland's
methods in conversation, which were evidently his
methods in all intellectual activity, "At first there was
a gradual approach to the question from one side, and
then, perhaps after a Uttle pause, unexpectedly from an
other. He was exploring, looking around, feeling his
way, searching for the general dimensions. He literally
'went around' the subject carefully and cautiously, and
on aU sides. And if some part necessary to its complete
ness was lacking, he made a note of it, and took it into
account aU the way to the end of his discourse. When
he had made his tour around the subject, as could be
noticed by a penetrating word here or a phrase of dis
covery there, his work was almost done, and with one
step he went straight to the centre of the complex
question. And then he was done, and the taUc was
ended." »
A great deal has been said about Cleveland's manner of
writing. It is interesting to us because it is thoroughly
significant of the man and of his mteUectual quaUty.
It is formal, elaborate, ahnost artificially literary, and
people are surprised that a nature so simple, in some re
spects so primitive, should adopt such conventional ex
pression. They do not see that it is precisely because
he was simple, reserved, an actor not a talker, that his
effort in words was labored and far-fetched. Perfect
simplicity and directness of form come naturaUy to those
to whom words are an inbom gift. Those who deal by
instinct with deeds, when they do taUc, are apt to taUt
149

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
ponderously. Yet when Cleveland put the hammer of
his character behind his words, they beat themselves
into the memory of the nation, and few presidents have
suppUed history with more phrases that are remem
bered. Cleveland's general intellectual quaUties are admi
rably illustrated in his spuitual and religious attitude.
The metaphysics of reUgion had no attraction for him.
He did not care to discuss speculative theology; and
so-caUed higher criticism, with its fine-spun analyses
and subtle interpretation of scripture, was extremely
distasteful to his practical bent. He had a certain fine,
large, human tolerance, weU shown in his excellent
story of the Old Baptist whom his Presbyterian friends
tried to get into their church: "No; you folks are Pres
byterians, and if I go over to your church I could n't
enjoy my mind." ' He liked to enjoy his own muid and
to let others enjoy theus. Nevertheless, his personal re
ligion was essentially conservative. What his father had
preached and his mother had practised was all he needed.
"The Bible is good enough for me," he said; "just the
old book under which I was brought up. I do not want
notes, or criticisms, or explanations about authorship
or origin, or even cross-references. I do not need or
understand them, and they confuse me." i"
It is tme that, like other human beings, he did not
always practise as he preached. There were uregu-
larities m his earlier life of a sort to scandalize his
mother. And his summer church attendance was
not quite what his father would have approved. But
if he did not always go to church, he rigidly respected
150

GROVER CLEVELAND
the Sabbath. And he had aU his life a fineness of con
science rather notable in a man of such wide experience of
the world and so practical a temper. When he was offered
a considerable sum for a magazine article, he refused to
take so much because he had accepted less for a sinular
contribution. " Again, he writes to a friend that he has
decUned an offer of a position "to which was attached
a very large salary, because I did not think I could do aU
the situation demanded and make the project a suc
cess." ^^ StUl more striking is the accoimt of his remorse
over a possible misstatement in connection with a fishing
adventure. Long after the incident occurred, he spoke
of it with obvious distress and when told that with the
cucumstances as they were, his story must have been
exact, he assented doubtfully : " I hope so, I hope so." ^'
It is evident that the aesthetic element of religion
would not have had much appeal for Cleveland. And
m purely sesthetic matters he was even less responsive.
It is interesting and curious to think that a man who
had such a vast mfluence and held such a prominent
position should have been utterly cut off from emotional
pleasures which mean the sweet of life to so many people.
Of course this is not pecuUar to hun. StiU, few even
practical men are more completely uidifferent to the at
traction of art and beauty. Of painting, of music, he
seems to have known Uttle or nothing. He Uked the old
hynins and had learned many of them by heart. In
the Ulness of his later years he read many novels. But
he went to his grave, as do mUlions of others, less prom
inent, with no consciousness whatever of what great
art is and does for us. 151

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
To the beauty of nature he was much more sus
ceptible, and Mr. West has admuably preserved the
account of one experience which must have been rep
resentative of hundreds, "I can't find a word for it,"
he said quietly , , , after a flood of sunshine had burst
through a Ught April shower. "What makes it so beau
tiful? There is no word good enough, 'Ravishing'
comes nearest, I think. Where does it come from?
Do you know what I mean? It is too good for us. Do
you understand me? It is something we don't de
serve." ^*
The dumb but pervading sense of such natural beauty
is bound up with what was always one of the greatest
deUghts of Cleveland's Iffe, outdoor sport. He was an
ardent fisherman and hunter. His Uttle book of fish
ing sketches brings one right close to him, brings one
right inside the garment of formal, conventional reserve
more than anything else possibly could. You seem to be
spending days of large, quiet pleasure with him, in the
woods and on the water, to be hearing his quaint sto
ries and shrewd comments, and entering into feeUngs
that he never showed to congressmen or reporters.
The very effort and simple artifice of the expression
reveal a simple nature doing its best to make refrac
tory words convey what it seeks to utter and cannot.
Under the cahn, controlled surface you divme latent
possibilities of excitement which could be aroused by
keen sport as weU as by human rivalry. There is temper
there, there is depression there and discouragement,
there is intense enthusiasm. There is the suggestion
of imagmative range, also, though it is instantly checked
152

GROVER CLEVELAND
by gentle irony, "The keen delights of imagination
which should be the cheering concomitants of the most
reputable grade of duck-hunting." "
It is characteristic of Cleveland's conservative temper
that his passion for sport was not modified into any of
the later nineteenth-century equivalents. It was sim
ply the hearty, out-of-doors expression of fuU-blooded
health and vigor. There is no sign of the slightest
scientific curiosity connected with it. There is no pre
tentious humanitarianism. The object of hunting was
kiUing; not wanton or wasteful, but plain kiUing, for
the excitement to be extracted from it. Yet it must
not for a minute be supposed that he was a hard or cmel
man. He was much the contrary. LoweU's keen vision
detected this on sUght contact: "With aU his fumness
he has a very tender and sympathetic nature, or I am
much mistaken." " The tendemess showed in many
ways. Even as to animals there was an almost exag
gerated sympathy, when they were not objects of sport.
He once worried for days because he had not interfered
to protect a cat which some boys were chasing. " He
had all the horror of death which is natural to persons
of energetic vitality. ^^ He had the deepest pity for
suffering and the pity tended quickly to take active
forms of relief.
He had especially one of the surest signs of sensibil
ity and tenderness, a constant love and appreciation
of children. He felt their sorrows. "The cry of a child
always distressed him. It made him quite miserable
sometunes when he was waUcing through the viUage.
He always wanted to stop and find out what was the
153

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
matter." " Their sports and spirits amused him and
he entered into them quietly but keenly, as if he were
a chUd himseff. Children understood this, as they al
ways do. General Wood, who knew Cleveland well,
says, "He was as fond of children as was Lincoln. He
understood them, and they instinctively knew it and
felt it, and they came to him as a friend." ^°
It is notable that this intimacy with children often
goes with a rather reserved and generally unsociable
temperament. We have noticed the same thing in the
case of Henry Adams. It was strikingly tme of General
Lee as of Cleveland. The explanation is simple. Chil
dren ask sympathy and attention. They never ask you
to give yourself. To Cleveland, as to Lee, the conven
tional restraints of formal society were irksome. Cleve
land could indeed supply charming platitudes on social
duty, as in the Fishing Sketches, "Every individual, as
a unit in the scheme of civilized social Ufe, owes to every
man, woman, and child within such relationship an
uninterrupted contribution to the fund of enlivening
and pleasurable social intercourse." ^^ This recaUs the
pretty saying of the old dramatist, "Oh, my lord, we
are aU bom in our degrees to make one another mearry." ^^
But Cleveland avoided the obUgation when he could,
hated long dumers and pompous ceremonies, and on
such occasions would often sit perfectly silent and not
manifest an overpowermg interest in the talkativeness
of others.
He hated the display and luxury and extravagance
of society, also. He beUeved that a nation showed its
sanity in its simpUcity, and the attacks in his writings
154

GROVER CLEVELAND
on the money craze of his contemporaries and their mad
rush for wealth are so frequent as almost to suggest a
hobby. He practised frugality as well as preached it,
cared nothing for costly clothes or fare or ornament.
One day, during Cleveland's second presidential term,
a train stopped at the Gray Gables station. "Look,"
called the conductor to the passengers, impersonally,
"there's Mrs. Cleveland and Grover on the platform."
The passengers looked. "WeU," said one woman, "ff
I had fifty thousand doUars a year, I would n't diess
Uke that," "
It must not be for a moment supposed, however, that
Cleveland's economy arose from any taint of meanness.
He was as indifferent to the accumulation of money as
to the spending of it. He tells us so himself, speaking
of the sacrifice of several thousand dollars for an unnec
essary scruple, "But I don't deserve any credit for that,
because money has never been a temptation to me," "*
And others, many others, bear him out. Even in his
early law practice "he was always indifferent and care
less as to his fees. His clients had to offer him money," *«
And the failure to accumulate arose not only from in
difference, but from wide generosity. Without the least
ostentation, he helped many a poor and straggling
applicant — and non-applicant — over difficulties and
tight places. When he left the law, his partner wrote :
" I am now closing up a case of Cleveland's which has
been mnning on for years, during aU which time he had
paid all disbursements . . . because the man was too
poor to meet these necessary expenses. And this is only
one case out of many that are here on our books." "
155

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
The assertion that Cleveland avoided general so
ciety does not mean that he did not appreciate human
relations. To be sure, he found politics rather detrimen
tal to friendship. Where there is so much to give, cas
ual affection is apt to look for what may be got and to
wither when disappointed. Also, such firm and seff-
centred natures are less disposed to form human ties
than those which naturally turn to others for advice and
comfort and support. But for that very reason the friend
ships formed are founded on a deeper comprehension and
sympathy and are usually loyal and permanent. In the
last years of his Ufe, Cleveland wrote some touching
words about his own — perhaps imagined — deficiencies
in the matter of human association and about his love
and longing for it. "I have left many things undone I
ought to have done in the reabn of friendship . . , and
still it is in human nature for one to hug the praise of his
fellows and the affection of friends to his bosom as his
earned possession," *' Certainly no one can read Gilder's
charming "Record of Friendship" without fmding m it
all the evidence of deep and genuine feeUng. And the
close intimacy of Cleveland and Joseph Jefferson, so
different in character and in their life-interests, yet
each so finely tempered in his own way, is one of the
pleasant traditions of American biography.
Cleveland's personal affection went even deeper in
his domestic relations than with his friends. His mother's
memory and the depth of her tendemess were treas
ured aU his Ufe. When he was elected governor of
New York, he wrote to his brother, "Do you know that
if mother were aUve, I should feel so much safer?"**
156

GROVER CLEVELAND
After McKinley's term had begun, he said: "I envy
hun to-day only one thing and that was the presence of
his own mother at his inauguration. I 'would have
given anything in the world if my mother could have
been at my inauguration." " AU the glimpses that we
get of his own home Ufe, with wife and children, are
charming: simple, devoted, sympathetic, undemonstra
tive, but participant of joy and grief alike.
And in all these intimate relations with those who
knew him best, the quiet, shy, reserved Cleveland of
general society melted and meUowed into the best of
company and the most responsive of Usteners and talk
ers. "He had a real 'gift* of silence," says one of his
biographers; *" that is, he could be silent in a way to
chill impertinence and curiosity and again, in a very
different fashion, to inspire enthusiasm and tempt con
fidence. And then, with the right company, he would
talk himself, would drop reserve and restraint and give
out his hope and heart with singular and engaging
frankness and so simply that you almost saw the life
right through the severing veil of speech.
The picture of Cleveland in these elementary social
connections would be quite incomplete without rec
ognition of his very attractive and winning humor.
People who know him only as the heavy and somewhat
solemn official do not appreciate this. Yet even in pub
lic addresses he could indulge in a vein of pleasantry,
as when, in comparing the legal and medical professions,
he says that the defeated client has the privilege of
swearing not only at the court, but at his lawyer, but
"the defeated patient, on the contrary, is very quiet
157

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
indeed and can only swear at his doctor if he has left
his profanity in a phonograph to be ground out by his
executor," »^ And the same tone creeps into the dig
nified veto of a pension biU: "Whatever may be said
of this claunant's, achievements during his short mil
itary career, it must be conceded that he accumulated
a great deal of disability," " All the evidence goes to
show that in conversation Cleveland could relish a
joke and make one, less often perhaps with pointed
wit than with those shrewd, quiet turns of ironic
humor so dear to the American heart. The "Fishing
Sketches" are permeated through and through with
simple fun of just this sort, which at its best sometimes
recalls the frolic fancy of Lamb, although it is a Lamb
with the slightly cumbrous gambol of an elephant,
"The ways of fishermen are inexplicable," says this
august follower of the craft. "The best fishermen do
not attempt it; they move and strive in the atmosphere
of mystery and uncertainty, constantly aiming to
reach results without a clue, and through the cultiva
tion of faculties, non-existent or inoperative in the
common mind." " And again, fishermen, "to their
enjoyment and edification, are permitted by a prop
erly adjusted mental equipment to believe what they
hear," " III
From the preceding analysis of Cleveland's personal
qualities, it will be evident that in some respects
he was not adapted to political success. Few great
statesmen have made themselves, by their own def-
158

GROVER CLEVELAND
inite action in behalf of right, more deliberately un
popular, Cleveland himself was perfectly aware of this
and could even state it with a certain grim enjoyment.
In speaking of one of his vetoes as governor, he said:
"Before I was married, I used sometimes to talk to
myself when I was alone, and after the veto, that night,
when I was throwing off my clothes, I said aloud:
'By to-morrow at this time I shall be the most unpop
ular man in the State of New York,'"" He had little
or none of that tact which enables some men to ingra
tiate themselves more in refusing than others when
they grant. Shyness, reserve, obstinate determination
to do right regardless of anybody's feelings, are all far
from being passports to triumph in American politics.
Moreover, Cleveland hated publicity and was al
ways suspicious and distrustful of newspapers and
representatives of the press. He had no tincture of the
useful art of appearing to tell them everything and
telling them nothing. He had an excellent memory,
and a paper which had once criticized him unjustly,
or, even worse, ridiculed him, was disliked and avoided.
Though seff-controlled and self-contained in all his
passions, journalistic indiscretion was more Ukely than
anything else to arouse him to a burst of temper. Of his
many snubs to reporters perhaps none was more apt
than the remark to a young fellow who was trying to
elicit comment on some question of foreign policy:
" That, sir, is a matter of too great importance to discuss
in a five-minute interview, now rapidly drawing to its
close," '* The retort was shrewd, but not calculated to
promote affection. 159

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
On the other hand, even politicians and joumalists
could not fail to appreciate Cleveland's great public
merits. There is his honesty, his infinite candor. Said
one journalist, after an attempt to get something, "He
is the greatest man I ever met — and he wouldn't
promise to do a thing I wanted." *^ Nothing touches
the American people like straightforward truth-tell
ing. When Cleveland's youthful morals were im
peached and he said at once, "TeU the facts," he won
more votes than any possible subterfuge could have
gained for him. Veracity was a habit with him, it was
constitutional. It was so ingrained that, as a fisher
man, he could even afford to make a jest of it and
give as the principle of that fraternity, "In essentials
— truthfulness; in non-essentials — reciprocal lati
tude."'* When it was a matter of life, not fishing,
there was no question of jest. His son once brought
out the truth under great temptation to the contrary,
and Cleveland remarked to a near friend that the boy
"evidently was going to be like him; because untruth
fulness seemed to be no temptation whatever to either
of them." s"
And as his candor appealed to the American nation,
so did his democratic way of living and thinking. He
knew the common people, he had passed aU his early
life in intimate contact with them, and watched them
and studied them with insight and sympathy, saying
little, but seeing much. Lowell, with his quick dis
cernment, said of him, "He is a truly American type
of the best kind — a type very dear to me, I confess." *°
He grasped the large daily facts of human nature,
160

GROVER CLEVELAND
because his own temperament was peculiarly and singly
based on them. He needed no effort to enter into com
mon lives, because his own life was common, in the
best sense. He would fish all day with an old farmer
and swap long stories with him and then incidentally
get and give homely views about political questions.
When, as governor, he was walking down to the State
House at Albany, if he came up with the blind crier of
the courts, he would take his arm and help him along
over the crossings, and let the business of his great
office wait. "
He cannot be said to have won votes by pure ora
tory. He was not a natural speaker, had not a trace
of the magnetism that carries vast multitudes away in
a storm of excitement. At the same time, especially in
later Ufe, his speeches told. He prepared them with
the utmost care and delivered them with dignity and
measured ease, and every hearer felt that they had
character and purpose behind them. Even his appear
ance, while never splendid or unposing, carried the
stamp of the square, determined energy which con
quers the world.
These things touched the general pubUc. But how
was it with the poUtical managers? Cleveland is
generally supposed to have been weak here. His ad
mirers often urge that all his success was gained not
through the politicians, but in spite of them, and that
he did not stoop to or understand the ordinary methods
by which the political game is played. Their arguments
are to a certain extent borne out by his own remark,
"This talk about the importance of 'playing politics'
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
— look at the men who have played it. Have they got
as far, after aU, as I have?" " On the other hand, he
was not so wholly ignorant as some supposed. He
knew men thoroughly, and such knowledge is the first
requisite of poUtical success. Moreover, even character
will not make a man governor of New York, without
some acquaintance with poUtical machinery. And
against the above comment of Cleveland we can set
another, which may not contradict but certainly am
plifies it: "Somehow there seems to have been an im
pression that 1 was dealing with something I did not
understand; but these men little knew how thoroughly
I had been trained, and how I often laughed in my
sleeve at their antics." ^*
Also, in political management as in everything else,
labor counts. Cleveland's superb physical strength
and tireless industry enabled him to attend to details
which others are forced to neglect. He always knew
what was going on, and this is the first step to control
ling it. He believed in doing your own work, doing it
carefully and systematically, and leaving nothing to
chance. There is an immense secret of achievement
in the apparently two-edged compliment of Tilden as
to his distinguished foUower: "He is the kind of man
who would rather do something badly for himself
than to have somebody else do it well." **
And Cleveland had another element of political suc
cess. He was an intense party man. We have seen the
pleasant humor which played over the surface of his
temperament. But it did not enter into his politics.
Life was not a game to him, as it was to Seward, or
162

GROVER CLEVELAND
a dainty work of art. He took the Democratic party
with an almost appalling seriousness. Over and over
he reiterates that the salvation of the country, ff
not the salvation of the world, must be accompUshed
by the Democrats. His elaborate statement of the
Democratic creed in 1891 is, to be sure, fairly gen
eral;** but its possibility of fulfilment was, for him,
completely bound up with Democratic organization.
"Of all the wonders that I have seen during my life,"
he said, "none has quite so impressed me as the re
serve power of the Democratic party, which seems to
have the elements of earthly immortaUty." *^ And
within a few months of his death he gave cordial
assent to the most sweeping possible declaration of
party principle: "Whatever your own party may do,
it is always a mistake to vote for a Republican." *'
Yet, from what we have already seen of the man,
it is hardly necessary to say that he never sacrificed
and never would have sacrificed duty, as he saw it,
to any party consideration. At an early stage in his
career he wrote officially: "I believe in an open and
sturdy partisanship, which secures the legitimate
advantages of party supremacy; but parties were
made for the people, and I am unwilling, knowingly,
to give my assent to measures purely partisan, which
will sacrifice or endanger their interests." ** He never
did give his assent to such. When he was being con
sidered as a candidate for a third nomination, he
declared, "If I am ever president of this country
again, I shall be president of the whole country, and
not of any set of men or class in it." "
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
And, however he may have disapproved of Repub
lican principles, he was always fair and even friendly
toward RepubUcan individuals. His repeated judg
ment of McKinley and of McKinley's administra
tion showed the broadest appreciation of practical
difficulties and the keenest sympathy with honest
effort. Further, he did not hesitate to fight the objection
able elements in his own party, wherever he found
them. "We love him for the enemies he has made,"
said General E. S. Bragg at the time of his first nomi
nation. *" The American people loved him for those
enemies and do still. But the wire-pulling and ring-
running poUticians in the Democratic party did not
love him and at times he seemed more severed
from them than from even the RepubUcans. Colonel
Watterson declares that "He spUt his party wide
open. The ostensible cause was the money issue. But
underlying this there was a deal of personal embit-
terment. . . . Through Mr. Cleveland the party of
Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden was converted from a
Democratic into a PopuUst." " This is an exaggerated
view. Yet it is certain that lack of poUtical tact, and
perhaps an increasing fixity in his own opinions,
fostered by too great disregard of criticism, brought
Cleveland into a vast amount of friction. Speaking of
him and Harrison, Henry Adams says, in his epigram
matic fashion, "Whatever harm they might do their
enemies, was as nothing when compared to the mor
tahty they inflicted on their friends." ^^ There was
trouble with friends and enemies both. Cleveland's
164

GROVER CLEVELAND
difficulties with the Senate are matter of history and,
although he may have had abstract reason on his side,
the results for his administrative usefulness could not
but be harmful.
Also, all these pubUc conflicts were isolating, pro
duced a feeling of helplessness and depression, even
in a temperament so cahn and sohd as his. In 1894
he wrote, "There never was a man in this high office
so surrounded with difficulties and so perplexed and
so treacherously treated and so abandoned by those
whose aid he deserves, as the present incumbent.
But there is a God, and the patriotism of the American
people is not dead; nor is all truth and virtue and sin
cerity gone out of the Democratic party." " The pa
triotism of the American people is not dead yet, and
the very isolation which at the time seemed to prove
the president unpractical and impracticable, serves
to-day to increase his dignity and to place him secure
above all parties as a great American.
IV
But let us elucidate a little more definitely what
Cleveland actually stands for in American history;
since it must be supposed that the man whose sum
ming up of official duty gave rise to the phrase,
"Public office is a public trust," ** and who gave his
life to workuig from that text, must have left some
memorial of permanent significance.
It may be recognized at once that this memorial is
not to be sought mainly in positive, progressive achieve
ment. Cleveland would not, of course, have denied the
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
possibUity or desuabiUty of progress. Some of his utter
ances, especially as to the accumulation of wealth,
have a radical tone which sounds like the advanced
twentieth century. StiU, it cannot be said that he
initiated great movements or changes of any kind.
Even his most positive efforts, as with the tariff and
civil service reform, like his splendid private useful
ness in the insurance world, were in the nature of a re
turn to purer and saner ideals, an endeavor to put pub
Uc business on the basis of thrift and common sense
which is absolutely necessary to success in the con
duct of private affairs.
For the man was essentially, by habit and tempera
ment, a thorough conservative. It may seem a little
surprising to find such a type in the Democratic party,
at least in the North. To understand this, we must
appreciate the wholesome, admirable truth that in
our American system each of the two major parties is
capable of being either conservative or radical. We
usually think of the Republicans as conservative, en
trenched in tradition and custom. Yet the cardinal
principle of Republicanism is the strength and vitality
of the federal government, and, as the most far-reach
ing progress and radical change must come through
that government, it is natural that radical and progres
sive elements should be constantly found in Republi
can alUance. On the other hand, while the Democrats
suggest radicalism, their two fundamental tenets have
always been the reduction of all government inter
ference to the lowest terms and in especial a jealous
assertion of the state governments against the federal.
166

GROVER CLEVELAND
Under the American Constitution these two principles
mean instinctive, persistent conservatism.
It is thus that we find Cleveland, in the midst of so
many radical, disturbing elements, the incarnation of
conservatism, of a firm, insistent, reiterated negative.
The value of such a negative force in any popular govern
ment may be measured by the difficulty of maintaining
it. To say no, is the ordinary politician's stumbling-
block. Even when he is forced to say it, he mouths it
with qualifying adjectives and explanations, seeking in
vain to mix the opposing bitter with the seducing sweet.
"Blaine and I, " said Garfield, "... have too much pain
in the refusals we have constantly to make." "
This was never the trouble with Cleveland. A good,
round, sonorous no came from him without the slight
est difficulty and there was no disputing and no re
voking it. From this point of view even his limitations
were a help to him. He was not a broad, speculative
political thinker, did not suffer from the doubts and
qualifications that always accompany such thought.
His most abstract writing, "Presidential Problems,"
is perfectly concrete, though the questions treated in it
would have been tempting to a discursive, imaginative
phUosopher. " It is a condition which confronts us —
not a theory," is perhaps Cleveland's best-known say
ing. ** He was always dealing with conditions, dealing
with them fairly, honestly, but practically, and leaving
theories on one side. The strong features of his char
acter were all such as to give the conservative, negative
element full force and vigor. He was simple and direct,
and that helps. He was immensely silent, and that
167

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
helps. He had unlimited patience, and patience is as
indispensable in conservatism as in other things. As he
himself said, "Certainly the potency of patience as a
factor in all worldly achievement and progress cannot
be overestimated."" Finally he had determination
pushed to a degree which he himself was perfectly
ready to call obstinacy, " his native obstinacy, which
he always insisted was his principal virtue." ^* He
said on one occasion, " I want to teU you now that, if
every other man in the country abandons this issue,
I shall stick to it." " He said it and he meant it.
We have only to consider the chief historical events
associated with Cleveland's name to see how marked
in all of them is this negative element. I have already
said that it was largely characteristic of his tariff
activity. Negative, his effort to check the free coin
age of silver. Negative, his superb action in the great
railroad strike. Negative, essentially, even the most
criticized of all his performances, the Venezuela mes
sage to Congress. As we look through his writings and
those of his biographers, the thing that impresses us
most overwhelmingly is veto, veto, veto. No doubt
this is the chief function that aU American constitu
tions leave to the executive. But in Cleveland's case
it seems to have been exercised with temperamental
readiness. Take his mayoralty, take his governorship,
take his presidency: always the veto. His vetoes in
four years amounted to "more than twice the number
in the aggregate of all his predecessors," says Richard
son. 8" And of course in no case was the motive mere
opposition or petulance or personal gradge. Every
168

GROVER CLEVELAND
veto was thought out with the most scrapulous care
and justified with the most patient reasoning. The
first functionary in the country sat up night after
night tiU the small hours, studying why he should say
no to the petty and insignificant petition of some
fraudulent pensioner.
From one point of view there is infinite pathos in
seeing a great statesman spend his soul on such mi
nute detaU of negation, instead of on the unsolved
problems of the world. The ultimate value and fruit-
fulness of this negative attitude appears only when we
consider that it was based upon the deepest, strongest,
fundamental belief in the people and in popular gov
ernment. For all his conservatism, Cleveland was no
reactionary, no aristocrat, no advocate of ruling the
masses by the assumed superior wisdom of a chosen
few. He held that the people should rule themselves,
that they could, and that they would, if a free chance
was given them. He believed in American ideals,
American traditions. He speaks of his "passionate
Americanism," *' and the phrase, coming from one who
knew and swayed his passions, is immensely significant.
And he believed in popular government because he put
behind it the whole mass and solidity of his belief in
God. God had ordained the framing of the American
Republic. God sustained it. "A free people," he said,
"without standards of right beyond what they saw
or did, without allegiance to something unseen above
them all, would soon sink below theu own level." ^^
It was just because he believed heartily and wholly
in American popular government that he wished to
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
guard it as it was. Let those who believed in neither
God nor man keep restlessly trying exoeriments, over
turning the old without any assurance of the new.
He had studied the Constitution as the Fathers had
left it. He had seen it working and believed it would
work stiU. It might be unperfect, like other human
inventions. Would the new devices be less so? The
thing was, to take the old and treat it honestly, indus
triously, faithfully. So treated, it would justify itself
in the future as it had done in the past.
Thus it was that as a superb negative force acting
for a great positive purpose Grover Cleveland did his
work in the world. A few grand phrases of his own
show how he did it better than any description I can
furnigh. Speaking of Lincoln and his many mUitary
pardons, he said: "Notwithstanding aU that might
be objectionable in these, what was he doing? He was
fortifying his own heart 1 And that was his strength,
his own heart; that is a man's strength." «' Fortify
ing his own heart ! Again, there is the splendid sentence
about Secrteary Carlisle: "We are just right for each
other; he knows aU I ought to know, and I can bear
all we have to bear."^* Could a man say it more
humbly and simply, "I can bear aU I have to bear"?
Finally, there are almost the last words he ever ut
tered, and what finer last words could any human
being utter? " I have tried so hard to do right." ^*
A four-square, firm, solid, magnificent Titan, who
could speak the everlasting no, so rare and so essen
tial in democracy. We stiU await the genius even
greater than he, who can speak the everlasting yes.
170

VII
HENRY JAMES

CHRONOLOGY
Henry James.
Born, New York City, April 15, 1843.'
Educated in France and Switzerland and at
Harvard Law School.
From 1869 lived mainly in England,
Roderick Hudson published, 1875,
Daisy Miller published, 1878.
The Portrait of a Lady published, 1881.
What Maisie Knew published, 1897.
The Ambassadors published, 1903.
The Golden Bowl published, 1904.
The American Scene published, 1907.
A Small Boy and Others published, 1913.
Became British subject, July 26, 1915.
Died, London, February 28, 1916.

Copyright photograph by Emery Walker, Limited
HENRY JAMES
By J.S. Sargeni, R.A.

VII
HENRY JAMES

He was a man whose whole life was in art, and to whom
life and art were inextricably one. He had no wife, he
had no children, he had no country; for his flitting and
vagrant cosmopolitan youth uprooted him from Amer
ica, and, although the Great War impelled him at last
to declare himself an English citizen, he had too much
the habit of the wide world to become definitely identi
fied with any particular nation. He lived and thought
and felt to write great novels, and he wrote them,
novels of an impossible subtlety and complexity, yet
too beautiful and too original for men to let them die.
Of course all his art was based on life. He repeats
and reiterates this. From an almost abnormally early
age he began to study the faces and the hearts about
him, to make notes, to register impressions, to accumu
late material which might, somehow or other, some
time or other, serve his great and never-forgotten
purpose. He was absolutely sincere in this. One of
the great charms of his character in every aspect is
sincerity and it is as evident in his art as in his daily
living. He wanted truth and nothing else, to grasp it
patiently and render it faithfully. "The novelist is a
particular window, absolutely," he says, — "and of
worth in so far as he is one." ^ And agaui, "I may
173

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
therefore venture to say that the air of reality . . .
seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel." *
And yet again, more personally, "For myself I Uve,
live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, what
ever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that." *
He was always an acute, minute, tireless observer.
He observed the external world constantly, and,
though he was too busy with humanity to indulge
often in long natural descriptions, he used delicate,
fleeting touches to set human passion in just the back
ground that will make it most impressive and most
enthralling. He observed the outward frame of man
with endless patient care and few have been more
cunning in teasing it to yield its secrets. Above aU, he
observed the soul with curiosity and comprehension
and even with tender sympathy, with awe and due,
modest sense of the groping incompetence of the wisest,
and perhaps he might have summed up his observation
in the simple words of one of his characters, "Every
thing's terrible, cara — in the heart of man." *
Yet, for all this constant and searching observation,
as one studies James, one gets an overwhelming sense
that to him life was chiefly interesting, not in itself,
but as matter for art. The crowding, shifting, shud
dering turmoU of human existence was stuff to make
novels of, or it was nothing. "All art is expression,"
he says, " and is thereby vividness." * But to hun the
expression was more than the thing expressed. Fact
was cmde, cumbrous, intrusive, perplexing. "More
distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts. . . .
Nine tenths of the artist's interest in them is that of
174

HENRY JAMES
what he shaU add to them and how he shaU turn
them."' Of his early youth, he teUs us, "My face
was turned from the fust to the idea of representa
tion — that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery,
dignity, distinction, gam of unportance in fine, on the
part of the represented thing (over the thing of acci
dent, of mere actuality, stiU unappropriated)." ^
His object was always to make an exquisite, perfect
work of art, and life must be fitted, moulded, trans
formed into a flawless achievement of ideal beauty;
not the shallow beauty which eschews superficial
ugliness, but the larger harmony which draws all
threads and strands together into the final triumph
of workmanship. Considerations extraneous to art,
so-called moral aims and purposes/were to be discarded
as merely distractmg and inappropriate. It is tme
that few men ever lived with a finer or more delicate
moral instinct, tme also that moral motives and subtle
questions of conduct often supplied the richest field
for artistic disquisition. But again, these were only
the material, interesting and valuable as furnishing
stuff for the absorbing artistic passion to develop all
its resources of cunning and cleverness. To teach
lessons, to make the world better, this was not the
artist's business, nor even was he bound to consider
whether he might make it worse. Things beautfful
ought not to make it worse, at any rate.
Not only did the intense preoccupation with artistic
excellence shut out moral considerations; it even dis
tracted thought from the vast variety and richness of
life in general. It seems as ff James, through aU his
175

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
long volumes, worked with bare soul and neglected
the casual garb of circumstance, the outer trapping of
profession and vocation, which differentiates souls to
the eye of the more superficial observer. Balzac in his
way^ TroUope in his, produced a wide range of types,
doctors, lawyers, preachers, workers in a dozen varied
lines of human activity. There are few of these in
James, and they appear only at moments, for some
fleeting agency in the dramatic action. Generally
speaking, also, he is confined to a lunited social class,
does not depict or care for the great ordinary herd
which makes up the substance of humanity. I do not
know of any more naive confession of such spiritual
exclusiveness than the sentence m the preface to the
revised edition of "The Princess Casamassima":
"We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, com
paratively Uttle for what happens to the stupid, the
coarse, and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of
it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens
to the more deeply wondering, to the really senti
ent." ' Yet the stupid, the coarse, and the blind make
up the bulk of the world. Even if we presume to set
ourselves above them, can we disregard them so com
pletely? There is no doubt that this detachment of Henry
James from the crude facts of life was much fostered
by his early and constant internationalism, his imper
sonal separation from all countries as such, not except
ing his native America. One of his most ardent ad
mirers declares that his chief mission was to civilize
the United States. If so, it is to be feared that he did
176

HENRY JAMES
not greatly fulfil it. At any rate, America was a puzzle
to him in earlier days, so far as he gave his thoughts to
it at aU; and when he came to study it in his old age,
the puzzle was not diminished for him and certainly
not for his readers. All the intense, crowding, sweat
ing, grinduig human complexity, which throbs from
Boston to San Francisco, was mainly lost on him. It
terrffied him, dismayed him, was "stupid, coarse,
blind," above aU was too rough and violent to be fitted
into nice, gauzy, shimmering webs of artistic achieve
ment. A striking illustration of this mighty predominance
of the artistic attitude in James's temperament is that,
keen as his powers of observing were, he was com
paratively indifferent to fact as a matter of record,
had not at least that sense of its sacredness which is
inherent in the born historian. When he read the
novels of his friends, he was not so much interested in
them as they stood, but was busy always with the
thought of rewriting them, making them over as they
should have been in his artistic conception. His own
past work he was not content to accept as a record of
his own past seff, to leave it to others as such a record;
but in his old age he revised and altered with the most
singular assiduity, producing, after all, a result, that
was tmly characteristic neither of his age nor of his
youth. Matthew Arnold said, when reprinting some
early writmgs, "Exactly as they stand, I should not
have written them now, but perhaps they are none the
worse on that account." » This was far from the atti
tude of James. Most curious of all, in pubUshuig
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
letters of his brother, he actually altered the text,
allegmg that what he saw fit to substitute was more
characteristic than what his brother actually wrote. '"
And I do not know how the artist's claim to domuiate
crude fact can go farther than that.
So, although we must recognize that Iffe and the
study of Iffe form the undeniable basis of James's, as
of aU other art, we constantly feel that with him the
artistic instinct is so engrossing, so involving, that
Iffe is absorbed and smothered by it. There is analy
sis, endless analysis, inexhaustible analysis, reflec
tion, dissection, connection, tiU a trifle seems drawn
out to the end of the world. What other human being
has more appreciated "the quite mcalculable tendency
of a mere graui of subject-matter to expand and de
velop and cover the ground when conditions happen to
favor it"?" Nothing is left to stand out alone m
vivid isolation and compelling brevity. The slightest
motive is traced back into its roots and finest fibres,
defined and refmed, untU it becomes at once monstrous
and unpalpable. The method is so subtle and elaborate
that the trivial is made important by intense minute
ness in the study of it and the very same minuteness
makes the important trivial, NaturaUy this complica
tion is least mtmsive m the admirable short stories,
and it took years to develop from the comparative
clarity of "Roderick Hudson" to the extraordinary
depths of "The Wmgs of the Dove" and "The Golden
Bowl," But it is the mark of James's work every
where and of his mind. He reveled in "shades" and
agaui and again he enlarges on them. He reproaches
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HENRY JAMES
Bourget with the "love of mteUectual daylight,"
which "is an injury to the patches of ambiguity and
the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing —
or much of it — of the effects that constitute the mate
rial of our trade." " His own characters grope in am
biguity and are garmented in shadow. He loved ghost
stories; but aU his work is one great ghost story, with
the uneasy thrill, the teasmg intensity of vagueness —
and the charm.
And hete it must be insisted that never, never does
James's artistic passion degenerate into a mere mysti
fication of words. He is as far as possible from the
tendency to disguise emptiness under phraseology
which is the plague of Browning. On the contrary,
words f aU him, will not serve him, in the long, far pur
suit of faint subtleties of distmction for which there
are no words. He strauis words, forces them, loads
them with content past what their frail natures will
endure, and then stiU there is something beyond them
and him, shimmering, impalpablfe, which he strives to
feel and to make his reader feel, and cannot. The mere
verbalist in literature seeks to make nothing real, but
James's process is rather to refine away reaUty to
nothmg. And that which should give substance and structure
to this gelatmous mass of analysis, the secret of com
position, simply betrays this passionate and consci
entious artist stiU further. He has elaborate prmciples
and theories of order, of balance, of design; but they
are too elaborate and serve rather to increase the com-
pUcation than to clarify it. He himseff was fond of
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
insisting upon his dramatic instinct, maintained that
he saw life in scenes and developed his stories largely
upon a scenic method. Yet the dramatic theory, like
the analytic, was excessive in its nature and rather
deprived his work of sustauied interest than informed
it with breathing hfe. His plays, like his novels, are
fascinatingly brilliant in detail: like the novels, they
involve the reader in a labyrinth of shades from which
there is no possible extrication. "It is art that makes
lifei," he said; " and while there may be a sense in
which this is profoundly true for aU of us, Ufe punished
him by setting his great and original work apart from
the thought of most persons whose real business is to
live. For there was never a more curious case of the
intense, unselfish passion for art pushed so far as really
to injure itself, to obscure itseff by obscuruig the
material on which it works. To refine, to distinguish,
to conjure up problems for the mere pleasure of solving
them — these are different tastes from the passion for
Ufe as such. "You see what a mistake you'd make
to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely
natural," says one of James's own characters. " She
might have said it to her creator. "I love Ufe — in art,
though I hate it anywhere else," says another. " And
it would not be fair to say this of her creator unrestrict
edly, but there would be a certain point in it. Far
more significant and suggestive, m fact of a smgular
weight and significance for James's whole work, is his
cruel phrase about himself: "And I find our art, aU
the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with
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HENRY JAMES
that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being
really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me.
Which is a most accursed way to be constituted." "
II
Did the man, then, you ask, have no life of his own,
aside from his absorbing preoccupation with art? It is
surprising how little, as far as the records that we have
inform us. No doubt these records are limited. The
two volumes of deUghtful letters, recently published,
belong to the writer's mature and later iife and nat
urally show more of reflection than passion. The three
volumes of autobiography also were written in old age,
and in such a temperament it was inevitable that
thoughts should be more remembered than feelings.
Yet even so in a history of boyhood one would expect
some outburst of hearty and violent experience, and
there is none, none: just an endless chain of subtle
analyses of petty facts, the vast dissection of "a
case" like "the cases" of the novels, in which all
petulant, vivid assertion of personality is drowned,
absorbed, in shades, refinements, complications, con
nections, without stint or limit. There is at times the
vague intimation of longing to live, of regret for not
having lived. Surely there is something personal to the
author in the words of Strether in "The Ambassa
dors": "Live aU you can; it's a mistake not to. . . , I
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intel-
Ugent to have it [the illusion of freedom], and now I'm
a case of reaction against the mistake." " Further,
there is the insistence that the artist must Uve to ac-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
cumulate his stock in trade: "We must know, as much
as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what
we are talking about — and the only way to know is to
have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and
enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single
'excess' of my responsive youth — I only regret m my
chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I did n't
embrace." ^^ And this does sound like the thrill of
human existence. But I am inclined to set against it
the words to Howells, "such fine primitive passions
lose themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or
at any rate in the act of reproduction." ^' Since the
weight of evidence goes to show that for this intensely
concentrated spirit, in youth as well as in age, contem
plation, profound inward absorption was the essence
of life, and I find endless significance in the revealing
phrase of William James as to his younger brother,
when scarcely out of boyhood, "Never did I see a so-
much uninterested creature in the affairs of those
about him." "
Let us consider him in relation to the common con
cerns of men and see how much alive he was. Sport,
athletics, exercise? None whatever, even in the
sporting years. Though he was of a nervous, anxious
temperament, nothing in his physique would seem to
have cut him off from bodily activity. But no aspect
of it appears to have interested him, and none enters
into his novels.
Money, business? He was frugal and self-controlled
in his own expenditure, wisely liberal as regards others.
He would have liked to make money from his work for
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HENRY JAMES
a little more amplitude of living. But money as an ob
ject in life he abhorred, and the business man, as a
type, including in his fancy most of his American fel
low-citizens, was as monotonous as he was detestable.
Even books, reading, were of minor unportance, ex
cept those that bore duectly upon his own pursuit. He
does mdefid say that "reading tends to take for me the
place of experience,"*^ and he at times expresses en
thusiasm for it. Beyond doubt, he was intimately fa
miliar with the works of modern novelists. But the great
writers of the past, even the imaginative writers, do not
figure largely in his Ufe.
Nor does it seem that he thought widely or cu
riously. His father was a subtle metaphysician, his
brother an active and creative one. Henry watched
their lucubrations rather helplessly and very indiffer
ently. Science interested him no more than meta
physics. The great physical discoveries of the age he
Uved in left him without enthusiasm. On aU these per
sonal points the evidence of the novels must, of course,
be used with caution. But the utter absence of broad
intellectual movement in them only supports the tes
timony of the letters and autobiographies. It is true
that this concrete attffude toward Ufe, coupled with
the tendency to dissolve the spirit in endless shades and
complications, produced a singular respect and awe
in face of the individual soul and its uidependent exist
ence. This is what James's secretary. Miss Bosanquet,
means, when she calls his novels "a sustained and
passionate plea for the fullest freedom of the individ
ual development that he saw continuaUy imperiled by
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
barbarian stupidity." ** But if he respected the soul,
he did not care to phUosophize about it. Even as to his
own art, which he discusses so often and so acutely, the
discussion is more apt to be concerned with the con
crete than with philosophical aspects. "Thank God,"
he says, "I've no opinions. ... I'm more and more
only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama,
phantasmagoria and dime museum." *^
This comment was, indeed, made in regard to
politics, although its significance is far more than po
litical. As to public affairs, James's indifference, until
his very last years, was mainly sovereign. Here his in
ternationalism appears as both cause and effect. A man
who has no country is not likely to be intensely patriotic.
A man who cares little for the history of the past is
not likely to be much aroused over the social and po
litical movements of the present. " I fear I am too lost
in the mere spectacle for any decent morality," he
says. ** Even the spectacle interested him more as em
bodied in individuals than as affecting great masses
of men.
With religion it was much as with other abstract
motives. James hunself confesses that he had little
contact with practical religion in his youth, and it is
obvious that he had little interest in it in age. His
spiritual attitude is perhaps as well summed up in the
foUowing passage as anywhere. " I don't know why we
live — the gift of life comes to us from I don't know
what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can
go on living for the reason that (always of course up to
a certain pomt) life is the most valuable thing we know
184

HENRY JAMES
anything about." " Of prayer he says, "I don't pray
in general, and don't understand it." *« Of a future life
he says, "It takes one whole life — for some persons, at
least dontje suis — to leam how to live at aU; which is
absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the
lesson." " Of Balzac, whom he so greatly admired, he
says: "His sincere, personal beliefs may be reduced to
a very compact formula; he believed that it was possi
ble to write magnificent novels, and that he was the
man to do it."*^ Again, "Of what is to be properly
called religious feeling we do not remember a suggestion
in all his many pages."*' I do not know why these
words cannot be aptly applied to Henry James.
We may indeed appreciate keenly the lack in others
of what we lack ourselves. In "The American Scene"
James expresses with the utmost vigor the religious de
ficiencies of his countrymen: "The field of American
life is as bare of the Church as a bUliard table of a
centre-piece; a truth that the myriad little structures
'attended' on Sundays and on the 'off' evenings of
their 'sociables' proclaun as with the audible sound of
the roaring of a million mice." *° But the complaint
here is rather aesthetic than devotional, and the
aesthetic side of religion was what touched James most.
Yet it is extremely curious to note that even his aesthetic
enjoyments were dwarfed and dulled by the absorbing
passion of creative analysis. Again, speaking of Balzac,
he remarks his lack of appreciation of the beauty of the
world and explains it by saying that "Balzac was as
Uttle as possible of a poet,"" And as before one feels
that James was as Uttle as possible of a poet also, Ex-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
ternal nature, when touched at all in his novels and in
his letters, is touched, like everything else, with ex
treme and fine imaginative delicacy. But there is
rarely any indication of rapture about it. In art he was
familiar with great painting and at times shows a
deep interest in it. He adored Italy for its artistic
richness, for its depth of memory, and for its melan
choly associative beauty. But outside of painting he
does not seem to have cared much for the simply beau
tiful. His pleasure in poetry was limited. He never
wrote it and seldom read it, unless certain French
writers. Music was a sealed world to him.
It is when we come to human relations that James
as a man really begins to seem alive. To be sure, like
most intellectual workers, he lived much in solitude
and cherished it, sought again and again to find some
remote corner of the world where he could order and
develop his crowding visions without the bustling in
trusion of critics or flatterers or even friends. Yet in
the main he enjoyed people, enjoyed frequenting so
ciety and dining out, haunting the thick throng for the
inspiration and stimulus it gave his curious spirit. He
sighs in age over the social ideal of his youth: "The
waltz-like, rhythmic rotation from great country-
house to great country-house, to the sound of perpet
ual music and the acclamation of the 'house-parties'
that gather to await you," '* His conversation was de
Ughtful, fuU of wit, color, suggestion, a trifle moderate
and elaborate, like his writing, but rich with succu
lence and charm, "When he could not get the very
word or adjective he wanted, it was most amusing to
186

HENRY JAMES
see him with one hand in the air, tfll he found it, when
he flashed his hand down into the palm of the other and
brought with a triumphant look the word he wanted,
the exact word." «« And his talk, like his books, and
like the whole man himself, was always sincere : ear
nest, scrupulous, and winning in its sincerity. The no
ble, thoughtful, kindly face alone was enough to make
a friend of you.
How I should like to get some glimpse of Henry
James in love! But this side of his life is completely
hidden from us. He makes no allusion to it in the auto
biography and there is no hint of it in his letters. Yet
his novels are saturated with love, contain, in fact,
little or nothing else, though it is love quintessenced
and alembicated till it hardly knows itself. One would
suppose that there was plenty of it in his life. And his
love-letters would have been one of the curiosities of lit
erature. Fancy the subtleties, the spiritual doublings,
the harassing doubts and questions and quahfications !
Yet this may be all wrong, and actual, absorbing love
might have simplified and clarified his soul beyond any
thing else on earth. Who can say? Unless some woman
stiU lives who has some of those letters. AU that comes
to us is the lovely, searching, pathetic suggestion in six
words, "the starved romance of my Ufe."*^
What we do know and actually see and hear is the
depth of his tenderness and devotion to his family and
friends, though even this warm and rushing stream does
at times risk extinction in the huge quagmire of his
haunting analysis. Hear him enlarge on the word
"liking," and wonder at hun: "The process represented
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
by that word was for each of us, I think, a process so
involved with other operations of the spirit, so beau
tifully complicated and deformed by them, that our
results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves
in the labyrinth of our reasons." ^^ And weU they
might ; but fortunately they did n't. I know no letters
more filled with a penetrating, involving affection.
This love, he admits, counts for more in the world than
even art, though he admits it grudgingly : " You are pre
cious to literature — but she is precious to the affections,
which are larger, yet in a still worse way." ^' When
those he loves are absent, he longs for them with a hun
gry longing which nothing else can satisfy, longs for
news of them, longs for words of soUcitude and thoughts
of tenderness. In spite of his brother's youthful charge
of lack of interest, he enters into their joys and triumphs.
He enters into their griefs and sufferings also, and with
a comprehension and sweetness and tact of sympathy
which must have been infinitely helpful. I cannot omit
the earnest, frank, wise, noble words which he ad
dressed to one he loved, in a great sorrow. Nothing
marks more the real depth of humanity hidden in him
under the apparently indifferent surface: "Only sit
tight yourself and go through the movements of life. That
keeps up our connection with life — I mean of the im
mediate and apparent Ufe; behind which, all the while,
the deeper and darker and unapparent, in which things
really happen to us, learns, under that hygiene, to stay
in its place. Let it get out of its place and it swamps
the scene ; besides which its place, God knows, is enough
for it! Live it aU through, every inch of it — out of it
188

HENRY JAMES
something valuable wiU come — but live it ever so
quietly." "
So it seems that the whole personal life of James,
aside from his art, centered in simple human affection.
And the flower of this affection was his passionate
interest in the Great War. I do not think he was much
concerned with the political and moral questions in
volved. He rarely discusses or refers to them, and such
things never had interested him before. But those he
loved were suffering, those whom his friends loved
were suffering, humanity was suffering. And aU the
depths of tenderness, which lay always, not smothered,
but eclipsed, forgotten, at the bottom of his heart,
was called into intense, active, beneficent energy.
If it had not been for those terrible years, something
would have been missing, not to his character, for it
was there deep hidden all along, but to our understand
ing and appreciation of his character. He was always
a great writer, but the war revealed him to every one
as a most lovable man. Ill
Yet, after all, his real humanity, his essential, vivid,
passionate existence, was in his art, and it is most
curious to watch him living perfectly in the exercise
of that, when he was so largely oblivious to every
thing else. "What's art but an intense life — if it be
real? " says one of his characters. '* The art of Henry
James was an intense life, at any rate.
AU his days he labored at it and much of his nights
was given to new developments, new inventions, new
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
and vaster analysis. The taking of notes was his busi
ness. He took notes on pleasure and pain, on suffering
and hope, notes on any casual incident of life, notes on
his family, on his friends, on himself, " If one was to
undertake to tell tales," he says, "and to report with
tmth on the human scene, it could be but because
'notes' had been from the cradle the ineluctable con
sequence of one's greatest inward energy," " In this
close and unremitting effort there was, of course, a large
amount of ambition, of desire for direct and obvious
success, but|it was also a matter of instinct, of a habit
of life which with daily exercise grew ever more exact
ing and more tyrannous.
And it was not only the formal daily habit, the rooted
necessity of accomplishing a definite task at a definite
hour. There was a splendid glow and thriU of excite
ment in the work. External stimulus might help,
the commendation of friends, the enthusiasm of ad
mirers, even the stinging of captious critics. But the
external was often more annoying than helpful. "I
wince even at eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 min
utes and 3^) at any qualffication of adulation." "
What really counted was the rushing, the inexplicable
artistic impetus itself. Why should a weary soul toil
and strain to make a troop of shadows strut and fret
and vex themselves for an hour and then fade utterly?
Who knows? But James did it with devouring passion,
lUie so many others. And the decay of age and the
wretched debflity of the body did not diminish one
jot the fury of creative hope. At sixty-five he writes:
"I never have had such a sense of almost bursting,
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HENRY JAMES
late ui the day though it be, with violent and lately too
much repressed creative . . . intention," *^
And of course triumph and success, when they came,
as they did come in even James's remote, perplexed,
and unpopular career, were acceptable, were welcome.
To what artist are they not? "Daisy MUler has been,
as I have told you before, a really quite extraordinary
hit," ** and such hits do tickle the heart that is most
detached. But the best glory — perhaps — is the feel
ing of secure achievement, and the best commendation
is one's own: "The thing carries itself to my maturer
and gratified sense as with every symptom of sound
ness, an insolence of health and joy." *'
The mischief of it is that this splendid exultation in
what one has accomplished does not, cannot last.
There are the difficulties of accomplishing anything.
There are the external difficulties, the horrid plague
of printers and publishers, interruptions, distractions.
There are the internal difficulties, stiU worse, when in
spiration simply stops and one sits and stares and longs
and does nothing and gets nowhere. Moreover, no
critic, however captious, sees one's defects so clearly
and overpoweringly as one sees them one's self. One
sees them so well, is so cuttingly aware of the weak
points, that on dark days it seems as if the work was
all weak points and nothing else.
And then come depression and discouragement, even
in a buoyant soul, and James, as he himself admits,
had a soul to which anxiety and dread came far too
easily. He is depressed if he is prevented from work
ing. When he begins a piece of work, he is haunted by
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
"a nervous fear that I shall not have enough of ray
pecuUar tap to 'go round,'"" And again, "To finish
a book in quiet and to begin another in fear. " " While
the completion is really as agitating as the commence
ment : "always ridden by a superstitious terror of not fin
ishing, for finishing's and for the precedent's sake, what
I have begun." *' And for those who look upon author
ship as an ecstasy, he has this general comment, which
is certainly not exhUarating: "The profession of deUght
has always struck me as the last to consort, for the
artist, with any candid account of his troubled effort —
ever the sum, for the most part, of so many lapses and
compromises, simplifications and surrenders." *''
Also, however indifferent one may be to the commen
dation of the general public, the sense of failure is
wearing, blighting to any mortal man. And it cannot
be denied that, as regards the reading world at large,
failure was the usual lot of Henry James. Works re
jected, works accepted and delayed indefinitely in pub
lication, works published and then treated with care
less indifference, bringing little praise and less profit —
when these torment the beginner in literature, he
may remember that they also tormented the greatest
of American novelists.
Nothing epitomizes better James's struggle and
effort, his gleams of hope and success, and his complete
lack of it in the grosser sense, than his dealings with the
theatre. He did not turn his attention to the stage till
comparatively late in Ufe, and therefore there was al
ways the consolation that if he had begun younger he
could have accompUshed more. But when the fever
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HENRY JAMES
seizes him, he is convinced that at last he has found his
proper sphere and that the drama is the real medium
in which his genius should achieve its destined work
ing, "The strange thing is that I always, universally,
knew this was my more characteristic form — but was
kept away from it by a half-modest, half-exaggerated
sense of the difficulty , . , of the conditions. But now
that I have accepted them and met them, I see that
one isn't at aU, needfully, their victim, but is, from the
moment one is anything, one's self, worth speaking
of, their master." ^^ And he sets himself to be the mas
ter triumphantly. He toUs more than he ever dreamed
of toiling on fiction. He studies the secrets of tech
nique with which those who think they understand
the theatre have beguiled so many passionate aspir
ants. He has his moments of hope, of confidence, of
enthusiasm, and portrays them with his customary-
vividness. A fairly successful provincial performance
cheers him, encourages hun. "The passage from
knock-kneed nervousness (the night of the premiere,
as one clings in the wings, to the curtain rod, as to the
pied des autels) to a simmering serenity is especially
life-saving in its effect." *^ Then things go wrong and
hope yields to utter disgust. And again, after one
failure, after two failures, a word of praise, a trifle of
alluring temptation, seduce him to renewed, more
strenuous effort. But the end is fatal, inevitable, as
it has been for so many whom that fascinating siren
has betrayed to far more complete destruction. Actors
are patronizing, encroaching, tyrannous, ignorant.
Audiences are more tyrannous and more ignorant still.
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Let us leave the loathed stage and go back to the quiet
writing of profound, great fiction, where at least the
failure is that of indifference and not of audible con
tempt. Through all this theatrical convulsion a common pre
text with James was that he needed money and that the
theatre was a dazzlingly facile and convenient means of
getting it. AU he cared to give to the stage was " time to
dig out eight or ten rounded masterpieces and make
withal enough money to enable me to retire in peace and
plenty for the unmolested business of a little supreme
writing as distinguished from gouging."^" Alas, the
stage was no more fruitful than other things in this di
rection, and it is really pitiful to see that such enormous
labor and such admirable genius could produce no more
tangible pecuniary result. But it is clear enough that,
though money might be the pretext, the passion went
far deeper than money. Success, triumph, applause,
in one simple word, glory, were underlying motives
with James, as with all other artists. He longed, not
only to do great things, but to have the seal of imme
diate wonder and enthusiasm set upon them. And in
spite of the approval of many of the discerning, few
writers who have toiled so vastly and worthUy have
received less of universal recognition.
The fine, the most notable thing through all this com
parative failure is the largeness, the sweetness, the dig
nity of James's attitude. Such public neglect of a man's
work is apt to produce sourness and bitterness. With
him it did not. Criticism he considered thoughtfully
and estimated wisely. It did not, indeed, often affect
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HENRY JAMES
his aims or methods. When does it ever? But he showed
a large charity in entering into the intention of the
critic, was always ready to aUow for other points of
view than his own. Nor did he often faU into the error
of so many disappointed authors, that of railing against
the taste of his contemporaries. He could not always
resist some rebellion against the triumphof the mediocre,
could not accept the vogue of the obviously cheap
and tawdry. But in the main he feels that he writes
for the few and with the discerning commendation of
the few he must be satisfied. And his are the admirable
words of rebuke to those who would revenge their
iU-success upon the world about them: "Most forms of
contempt are unwise; but one of them seems to us
peculiarly ridiculous — contempt for the age one lives
in," ^^ Broad kindUness, thoughtful, earnest, patient
sincerity, these are not always the distinguishing
qualities of the artist; in James they were eminently
and charmingly exempUfied,
In nothing perhaps more than in his tone toward his
fellow-writers. Here again pretentious emptiness some
times wins deserved condemnation. But in the main
he was largely generous and sympathetic. He had many
close friends among the authors of his time, friends to
whom he wrote with the peculiar exquisite tenderness
of friendship that characterizes his letters. Many of
these friends were much younger than he and many of
them quickly passed him in the race for success and
financial profit. He never resented this, never showed
any small soreness or gmdging. He counseled wisely
and congratulated warmly and cherished an ever-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
growing affection where in many rivahy would have
fostered a certain chilliness, if not estrangement.
Few things of the kind are more touching and pleasing
than his manly, simple acceptance of the unneces
sary and ill-mannered criticism introduced by his near
friend Mr, Wells into his novel "Boon." "
So the long, patient, toilsome Ufe flitted away,
leaving a huge mass of production behind it, which,
after aU, had perhaps not greatly affected the busy
world. But with all the toil and all the struggle and all
the disappointment, few writers have got more sub
stantial satisfaction out of the mere doing of their own
work. The mystery of words and their strange, subtle,
creative and created relation to thoughts has not
been fully elucidated yet and perhaps never will be.
But it is certain that, for the born worker in them,
they have inexplicable and inexhaustible secrets and
sources of delight and joy. Who is there who has
probed these secrets and drained these sources more
passionately than Henry James?

VIII
JOSEPH JEFFERSON

CHRONOLOGY
Joseph Jefferson.
Born, Philadelphia, February 20, 1829.
Acted at Frankhn Theatre, New York, 1837,
Married Margaret Clements Lockyer, May 19, 1850.
Made hit as Dr. Pangloss, August 31, 1857,
In Austraha, 1861-1865,
Appeared as Rip Van Winkle at the Adelphi Theatre,
London, September 4. 1865.
Married Sarah Isabel Warren, December 20, 1867,
Produced The Rivals at the Arch Street Theatre,
Philadelphia, 1880,
Published Autobiography, 1889-1890,
All-Star Rivals Tour, 1896.
Died, Palm Beach, Florida, April 23, 1905.

JOSEPH JEFFERSON

VIII
JOSEPH JEFFERSON I
Jefferson was not bom on the stage, but his fam-
Uy for generations had been associated with the
theatre. His first appearance that he remembered
was in 1832, when he was three years old, and he con
tinued to act in aU sorts of parts and with aU sorts of
experiences almost till his death in 1905. The theatrical
influence and atmosphere seemed to surround him
at all tunes. He grew up with the strange richness
of wandering Bohemian vagrancy which attaches to
the profession in the dreams of youth, and he met his
fuU share of the hard knocks and bitter struggles which
the dreams of youth pass over lightly. Also, he had
something of the easy, gracious temper which en
joys the charms of such a life and takes the trials as
they come. His father had even more of it. When he
was reduced to total bankmptcy, he went fishing, and
said to those who found him so occupied: "I have lost
everything, and I am so poor now that I really cannot
afford to let anything worry me." ^ The son inherited
from his mother a soul of somewhat more substan
tial tissue. He did not like bankruptcy and avoided
it. Yet even he thoroughly savored a nomad life and
a changing world. He writes of such : " It had a rov
ing, joyous, gipsy kind of attraction in it that was
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
irresistible." * It is said that his great-grandmother
died laughing.' He lived laughing, at any rate, or
smiling, with the tenderest sympathy, at all the strange
vagaries of existence. To be sure of it, you need only
study his portraits, that curiously wrinkled face, which
seems as if generations of laughter had kneaded it to
the perfect expression of all pathos and aU gayety
The striking thing is that, with this profuse contact
with every side of human experience, which must have
included the basest, the most sordid, the most vicious,
the man should have kept his own nature high and
pure to a singular degree. Certainly no one was more
in the world, and in a sense of the world; yet few have
remained more unspotted by it. He often quoted with
approval the fine saying, "We cannot change the
world, but we can keep away from it." * He kept away
from it in spirit. His great friend. President Cleveland,
said of him : " Many knew how free he was from hatred,
malice, and unchai'itableness, but fewer knew how
harmonious his qualities of heart, and mind, and con
science blended in the creation of an honest, upright,
sincere, and God-fearing man." " And Colonel Watter
son, who was intimately acquainted with him, remarks,
more specifically : " I never knew a man whose moral
sensibilities were more acute. He loved the respect
able. He detested the unclean." «
This moral tone was not simply the sanity of a
wholesome, well-adjusted nature; it was a delicacy, an
instinctive refinement that rejected the subtler shades
of coarseness as well as mere brutality. Not that
Jefferson was the least in the world of a Puritan. The
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
suggestion would be laughable. But he avoided the
obscene as he avoided the ugly. He disliked grossness
on the stage as he disliked it in the drawing-room, and
even deliberately asserted that the latter should be a
criterion for the former,^ which is perhaps going a
Uttle far. And he wanted as much decency behind the
scenes as before, "Booth's theatre," he said, "is con
ducted as a theatre should be — like a church behind
the curtain and like a counting-house m front of it," *
He not only avoided the moral looseness of Bohemi-
anism; he could not tolerate its easy-going indifference
to artistic method. He reflected deeply and carefully
on the nature of his art and did not cease to reflect on
it as long as he practised it. He had definite views as
to its purpose, and, while we may not agree with those
views, we must at least recognize their validity for one
of Jefferson's temperament. Realism he would have
nothing to do with. Art, he urged, was from its very
nature selective, suggestive, aimed to give the spiritual
essence, not the superficial, material detail. Just so far
as these details served the spirit, they were to be used
and developed amply; but they were to be disregarded
altogether, when they threatened to drag down the
spirit and smother it.
He gave careful attention to the audience and its
point of view. The strength of his artistic achievement
laj'^ both in distinction and in human feeling, but with
the emphasis rather on human feeUng, and he knew it
and studied the human hearts to which he addressed
himself. All the human hearts, moreover. He was no
actor to evening dress and diamonds. How admirable
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is his appeal to Miss Shaw to remember the second
balcony: "They are just as much entitled to hear and
see and enjoy as are the persons in the private boxes," '
And he reflected and often spoke on the great
critical problem of whether the actor should act from
feeling or from inteUect. To Jefferson's keen common
sense the problem was hardly a problem at all. Every
actor must use feeUng and intellect both, the propor
tion differing according to the temperament. An
intense imaginative sympathy with the emotion of the
character involved must lie at the bottom of every
successful impersonation. But this imaginative sym
pathy must at all times be controlled by clear and
competent analysis. Surely no actor could have had
keener sensibihties than had Jefferson himself. Once,
at a pathetic moment in a part he had played over and
over again, he was observed to falter, lost himself,
and the curtain fell abruptly, "I broke down," he
explained afterwards, "completely broke down. I
turned away from the audience to recover myself. But
I could not and had the curtain rung." i" Yet he was
commonly self-possessed enough in the most intense
situations to make comments to his feUow-actors, and
he summed up the whole question in the often-quoted
saying, "For myself, I know that I act best when the
heart is warm and the head is cool." "
As Jefferson was thorough in analyzing the theory
of his profession, so he was industrious and conscien
tious in the practice of it. Although, in his later years,
he confined himself to a few parts, he had been in his
youth an actor of wide range, and he never ceased to
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
study his oft-repeated triumphs for new effects and
possibilities, was never the man to lie back upon es
tablished reputation and forget the toil necessary to
sustain it. " I learn something about my art every
night," he said, even m old age. " And he not only
worked, but he worked with method and foresight. He
suggests in his "Autobiography" that he was careless
and unreliable as to facts, ^' and perhaps he was in indif
ferent matters. But when it came to planning a cam
paign, he knew what he was seeking and got it. For he
was an excellent man of business. So many actors earn
great sums and let them slip through their fingers.
Not Jefferson. His ideas of financial management were
broad and liberal. He put no spite into it and no mean
ness. See his excellent remarks on competition and
opposition. ^* Nor did he desire money for itself. A
moderate income is enough for him. "Less than this
may be inconvenient at times; more than this is a
nuisance." " But hard lessons had taught him the
value of a dollar when he saw it, the pleasure it would
give and the misery it would save, and when the doUars
came, he held on to them.
In his relations with his fellow-actors he appears to
have been delightful. At least I have looked rather
widely for fault-finding and have not discovered it. He
enjoyed practical jokes, as in the case of the exqui
sitely dressed dandy whom he had to embrace upon the
stage: "I held him tight and rumpled his curls, and
then I heard him murmur, in a tone of positive agony,
' Oh, God ! ' He was not in the least hurt, but he seemed
to feel that his last hour had come," " No doubt
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Jefferson was tolerant of such jokes when played upon
him. Also, with his charming frankness, he lays bare
in hunseff the weaknesses to which human nature is
Uable. Jealousy? "In this instance my rival was a
good actor, but not too good to be jealous of me, and
ff our positions had been reversed the chances are that
I would have been jealous of him," " Temper? He
had temper and showed it, as he illustrates by various
examples, without excusing himself. Quarrels? They
occurred in his Iffe, as in most lives, and he admits that
his part in them was not always creditable. But the
quarrels were relieved and soon healed by a wide com
prehension of the human heart and love of it. And,
above all, a sane phUosophy taught that no quarrel
should be perpetuated by talking about it or making
any parade of it whatever. "If people could only
reaUze how little the pubUc care for the private quar
rels of individuals — except to laugh at them — they
would hesitate before entering upon a newspaper con
troversy." ^^ If Whistler could have learned that lesson,
his life would have been pleasanter to read about.
And Jefferson's good terms with his fellows were by
no means confined to the negative. He was always
ready for a frolic with them. He was cordially inter
ested in their affairs. He was wUluig to give both
money and time to extricate them from difficulties.
He could do what is perhaps even harder, bestow
unstinted and discerning praise upon theu achieve
ments. And he could stand up for their professional
dignity, whether they were alive or dead. When a
fashionable minister refused to perform the funeral
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
service for an actor on account of his caUing, Jefferson
asked m wrath if there was no church where he could
get it done. "There is a little church around the cor
ner," was the reply. "Then, if this be so, God bless 'the
Uttle church around the comer.' " ^« The name sticks
to this day. No wonder that a friend who knew hun
intimately could write, "He was the most lovable per
son I had ever met either in or out of my profession," "
A better test than even relations with the profession
generally is that of management of the actors in his
own company and under his especial charge. It is
evident that he preserved discipline. Irregularities in
conduct and irregularities in artistic method he would
not tolerate. But he was reasonable in discipline, and
he was gentle, as gentle, we are told, with his sub
ordinates as with his children and grandchildren. ^^
In strong contrast to actors like Macready and Forrest,
he had the largest patience in meeting unexpected
difficulties. One night the curtain dropped in the
midst of a critical scene. Jefferson accepted the situa
tion with perfect calmness. Afterwards he inquired
the cause of the trouble, and one of the stage-hands
explained that he had leaned against the button that
gave the signal. "WeU," said Jefferson, "will you
kindly find some other place to lean to-morrow
night?" "
He was helpful to those about him, and gave advice
and encouragement when needed, but this was less by
constant lecturing than by the force and suggestion of
his own example. You could not be with him without
learning, ff you had one atom of the stuff of success in
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
you. Some great artists daunt and discourage by their
very presence, Jefferson soothed. When he saw that
you were anxious and troubled, "he laid his hand on
your shoulder in that gentle way that stilled all tumult
in one and made everything easy and possible, saying:
'ItwiUbeaUright.'"*' It is true that some urged and do still that Jefferson
wanted all the stage and all the play to himself. At a
certain point in his career he became a star. After that
he altered plays to suit his own prominence and at last
centred practically his whole effort on a very inferior
piece that happened to be adapted to his temperament
and gave him enormous professional success. It may
reasonably be argued that this desire to engross atten
tion to himself kept him out of real masterpieces, and
even more subtly that he had not the genius to make
himself unquestioned master of those masterpieces.
On the other hand, his admirers insist that, before he
became a one-part actor, he appeared in a great variety
of parts, over a hundred in all, and in most, com
petently, if not triumphantly. There is no doubt that
he himself felt the charges of repetition and self-as
sertion, though he could always meet them with his
charming humor, as when he tells the story of his
friends' giving him a Christmas present of "The
Rivals" with all the parts but his own cut out. =** The
cleverest thing he ever said as to the lack of variety
was his answer to Matthews, who charged him with
making a fortune with one part and a carpet-bag. " It
is perhaps better to play one part in different ways
than to play many parts all in one way." ^' And Wiii-
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
ter's defence against egotism is probably in the main
justified: "When he was on the stage he liked to be the
centre of attention; he liked to have the whole scene to
himself; but he perfectly weU knew the importance of
auxUiaries and the proportion of component parts to
make up a symmetrical whole; he could, and when
needful, he always did completely subordinate himself
to the requirements of the scene," ^^
But by far the most interesting light on Jefferson's
view of his own professional methods is to be found in
the conversation reported by Miss Mary Shaw as to her
performance of Gretchen ui "Rip Van Winkle." Miss
Shaw had been inclined to emphasize the possibilities
of tenderness in Gretchen's character, but Jefferson,
in his infinitely gentle way, put a stop to this immedi
ately. "You must not once during the play, except in
the last act, call the attention of the audience to any
ordinary rule of conduct or mode of feeling. You must
play everything with the idea of putting forth this
central figure Rip Van Winkle, as more and more lov
able, the more and more he outrages the sensibilities,
that being the ethical meaning of the play." " And there
are many other words to the same effect, all admirably
ingenious and on the whole reasonable. Only I should
like to have seen Jefferson smile, as he said them.
Whether he smiled, or whether he was serious, there
can be no doubt that, with all his gentleness and all his
humor, he had an immense ambition that stuck by
him tiU he died. Over and over again he acknowledges
this, with his graceful jesting, which covers absolute
sincerity: "As the curtain descended the first night
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
on that remarkably successful play ["Our American
Cousin"], visions of large type, foreign countries, and
increased remuneration floated before me, and I re
solved to be a star if I could." '^ Those who think only
of his later glory do not reaUze the long years of diffi
culty and stmggle. His youth knew the plague of
fruitless effort. He met hunger and cold, deception and
rejection. His words about failure have the vividness
of intunate acquaintance with the subject. " If you are
unsuccessful as a poet, a painter, an architect, or even
a mechanic, it is only your work that has failed; but
with the actor it does not end here : if he be condemned,
it is hunseff that has failed." « And further, "The
mortification of a personal and public slight is so hard
to bear that he casts about for any excuse rather than
lay the blame upon himself.""* Stage-fright, utter
distmst of genius and fortune, — he knew it, oh, how
weU he knew it ! To the very end he was nervous over
the chance of some sudden incapacity or untoward
accident. "I am always attacked with a nervous fit
when I am to meet a new assemblage of actors and
actresses." *^ And he said to an amateur who asked
him for a cure for such feelings, " If you find one, I
wish you would let me have it." "
He was as sensitive to applause and appreciation as
to failure. When words of approval began to come,
they were drunk in with eagerness. "How anxious I
used to be in the morning to see what the critic said,
quickly scanning the article and skipping over the
praise of the other actors, so as to get to what they
said about me." " And years did not abate the zest or
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
duU the edge of it. To be sure, he liked discretion in
compUments, as did Doctor Johnson, who said to
Hannah More, "Madam, before you flatter a man so
grossly to his face, you should consider whether your
flattery is worth his having." Jefferson's method was
gentler. To a lady who hailed him as "You dear, great
man!" he answered, "Madam, you make me very
uncomfortable." " But when the compliments were
deftly managed, he liked them. "He was susceptible
to honest admiration," says Mr. Wilson. "I have
often heard lum declare since, that he would not give
the snap of his finger for anybody who was not." *^
And when the compliment came, not from an individ
ual, but from a vast audience, he found it uplifting,
exhilarating beyond most things on earth. This stimu
lus was so splendid, so out of normal experience, that,
with his mystical bent, he was inclined to relate it to
some magnetic agency. "He claimed," says Miss
Shaw, "that what he gave the audience in nervous
force, in artistic effort, in inspiration, he received back
in fuU measure, pressed down and mnning over. . . .
And how well I saw this great truth demonstrated by
Mr. Jefferson. Every night this delicate old man, after
having been virtually on the stage every moment for
hours in a play he had acted for thirty-seven years, and
which therefore of itself afforded him little or no in
spiration, would come off absolutely refreshed instead
of exhausted." "
Few human beings have had more opportunity to
drink the cup of immediate triumph to the bottom.
Jefferson himself often enlarged upon the ephemeral
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
quality of the actor's glory. No doubt the thought of
this gave added poignancy to his rendering of the
celebrated phrase m "Rip Van Winkle," "Are we so
soon forgot when we are gone!" ^'' And he urged that
it was but just that this glory, being so brief, should be
immense and fully savored. He savored it, with perfect
appreciation of its casual elements, but still he savored
it with large and long delight. He recognized fully that
his lot had been fortunate, and that, although he had
had to toil for success, he had achieved it. "I have
always been a very contented man whatever hap
pened," he said, "and I think I have had good reason
to be." '* He recognized also in his triumph the sub
stantial quality which comes from normal growth; as
he beautifully phrased it, "that sweet and gradual
ascent to good fortune that is so humanizing," *'
Respect, tendemess, appreciation, from young and old,
rich and poor, wise and unwise, flowed about his ripe
age and mellowed it, and he acknowledged them again
and again in most touching words. " It has been dear
to me — this life of illuminated emotion — and it has
been so magnificently repaid. ... I have been doubly
repaid by the sympathetic presence of the people when
I was playing, and the affection that seems to follow
me, like the sunshine streammg after a man going
down the forest traU that leads over the hiUs to the
lands of moming. No, I can't put it in words," "
Then he added, with the whimsical tum which gave
his talk so much of its charm, "Perhaps it's a good
thing to quit the stage before the people have a chance
to change their minds about me." *'
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
As is well known, the climax of Jefferson's fortunate
career lay in the discovery of "Rip Van Winkle," not
of course as a new play, but as something perfectly
suited to Jefferson himself. His whole account of this
discovery, 'of the first suggestion on a haymow in a
country barn on a rainy day, of the gradual growth of
the piece and its final triumph, is extremely curious. *^
Equally curious is the study of the play itself. As read,
it appears to be crude, inept, inadequate, illiterate. It
is not that the language is simple. Much of it is not
simple, but heavily, commonly pretentious, with that
conventionality which is as foreign to life as it is to
good writing. Yet Jefferson took this infirm, tottering
patch of literary ineptitude and by sheer artistic skill
made it a human masterpiece. When the play was first
produced in England, Boucicault, the author, ex
pressed his doubts as to Jefferson's handling of it:
"Joe, I think you are making a mistake : you are shoot
ing over their heads." Jefferson answered: "I'm not
even shooting at their heads — I'm shooting at their
hearts." ^ He did not miss his mark.
II
So much for the actor. In studying him we have had
glimpses of the man, but he deserves to be developed
much more fully. First, as to intelligence. His shrewd
ness, his keenness, his acute insight mto Ufe and human
nature appear in every record of hun. He understood
men and women, read their tempers, their desires, their
hopes and fears; no doubt largely by his own, as is the
surest way, _For he made a constant, careful, and
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
clear-sighted analysis of himself. Few persons have con
fided to us their observations in this kind with more
winning candor. That is, when he sees fit. His "Auto
biography" is not a psychological confession and deals
intentionaUy with the external. But the glimpses of
inner life that he does give have a singular clarity. He
admitted his merits, if we may accept the account of
Mr. Wilson, whose conversations with him generally
bear the strongest mark of spiritual veracity. " You
always do the right thing," said Mr. Wflson. "WeU,"
said Jefferson modestly, "I believe I make fewer mis
takes than most men. I think I am tactful rather than
poUtic, the difference between which is very great." "
I find this a little hard to swaUow. But Jefferson's
ample admission of his faults and weaknesses is appar
ent everywhere and is really charming. He agrees to
accept a role to please a friend: "I did so, partly to
help my old partner, and partly to see my name in
large letters. This was the first time I had ever enjoyed
that felicity, and it had a most soothing influence upon
me." ^* He sees a rival actor and appreciates his ex
cellence, "though I must confess that I had a hard
struggle even inwardly to acknowledge it. As I look
back and call to mind the slight touch of envy that I
felt that night, I am afraid that I had hoped to see
something not quite so good, and was a little annoyed
to find him such a capital actor ." *« All actors and all
men feel these things; not all have the honesty to say
them. Also, Jefferson's vivacity and activity of spirit made
him widely conversant with many subjects. " I never
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
discussed any topic of current interest or moment with
him," says Colonel Watterson, "that he did not throw
upon it the side-lights of a luminous understanding,
and at the same time an impartial and inteUigent judg
ment." " It must not be supposed, however, that he
was a profound or systematic thinker, and his acquaint
ance with books, though fairly wide, was somewhat
superficial. Even Shakespeare, whom he worshiped
and introduced constantly into discussion and argu
ment, he had never read through.
The truth is, he was too busy living to read. He
relished life, in all its forms and energies. He was fond
of sport, and entered into it with boyish ardor. His
love of fishing is widely known, because it figured in
his relation with president Cleveland, Their hearty
comradeship is well illustrated by the pleasant anec
dote of Cleveland's waiting impatiently while Jeffer
son chatted at his ease with the commander of the
Oneida. "Are you going fishing or not?" called out
the President in despair, " I do not mean to stir until I
have finished my story to the Commodore," said the
actor. ^* Jefferson sometimes shot as well as fished.
But in later years the gun was too much for his natural
tenderness, "I don't shoot any more," he said; "I
can't bear to see the birds die." " And it is character
istic that to an interviewer, who had ventured some
casual comment on the subject, he remarked later,
"You said you didn't like to kiU things! It made such
an impression on me that I've never been shooting
since." ^^
Jefferson would have been even more absorbed in
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
sport if he had not had another distraction which fas
cinated him and took most of the time and strength
that he could spare from his regular pursuits. From
his childhood he loved to paint. His father did a good
deal of scene-painting and the son, hardly out of
infancy, would get hold of the father's colors and busy
himself with them for hours. The passion endured and
grew, and Jefferson even felt that, ff he had not been
an actor, he would have been a painter and a success
ful one. His work, mostly landscapes, shows the grace,
sensibUity, and subtle imaginative quality of his
temperament as well as the influence of the great
French painters whom he so much admired.
But what interests us about Jefferson's painting is
the hold it had upon him and the zeal with which he
threw himself into it at aU times. When he was at
home, he shut himself into his studio and worked.
When he was touring the country, and acting regularly,
"in the early morning — at half-past six or so — he
would be heard calUng for his coffee and for his palette
and bmshes. It was very hard to get any conversation
out of him during the day that did not in some way
lead up to painting." ^^ This is one of the curious
cases of a man with a genius for one form of art,
possessed with the desire to excel in another. When
asked if it were true that he would rather paint than
act, he replied it most emphatically was." At any
rate, there can be no question that painting filled his
thoughts ahnost as much as acting. When he was in
Paris, he says, " I painted pictures all day and dreamed
of them aU night." ^' He cherished the hope that after
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
his death his paintings would be prized and sought for,
and he fondly instanced Corot, whose work did not
begin to sell tiU he was fifty." A scene of natural
beauty always translated itself for him into a picture.
One day, when he had been admiring such a scene, a
friend said to him, "Why don't you paint it?" "No,
no, no! Not now." "And when?" "Oh, sometime in
the future — when I have forgotten it." " But the
most charming comment on this pictorial passion is the
little dialogue between Cleveland and Jefferson on the
morning after Cleveland was nominated for the second
tune. Jefferson was standing at a window at Gray
Gables, looking out over the Bay. Cleveland put a
hand on his shoulder, "Joe," he said, "aren't you
going to congratulate me?" And Jefferson: "Ah, I
do! BeUeve me, I do congratulate you. But, good God,
if I could paint like that, you could be president of a
dozen United States and I wouldn't change places
with you." ^^
The drawback to painting, at least in Jefferson's
case, was that it was a solitary pleasure. It was only
when alone that artistic ideas would come to him. "
He commented on this with his usual delicate wit,
"But if I like to be alone when I paint, I have no ob
jection to a great many people when I act." ^* And in
general he had no objection to a great many people,
liked them in fact, and was a thoroughly social and
human being. He had aU the qualities of a pecuUarly
social temperament, "He was fuU of caprices," says
Winter; "mercurial and fanciful; a creature of moods;
exceedingly, ahnost morbidly sensitive; eagerly desir-
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
ous to please, because he loved to see people happy," "
He could enter into the happiness of others, and
quite as keenly into theu distress. He was "sensible
of the misfortunes and sufferings of the lame, the
blind, the deaf, and the wretched," *" He not only felt
these things and relieved them with words, with coun
sel, and with sympathy; but he was ready and active
with deeds, both in the way of effort and in the way of
money. With the shrewdness of a Franklin, he saw
the subjective as well as the objective benefit of such
action, "My boys sometimes get discouraged," he
remarked, "and I say to them: 'Go out and do some
thing for somebody. Go out and give something to
anybody, ff it's only a pair of woolen stockings to a
poor old woman. It will take you away from your
selves and make you happy,'" *^ He was sometunes
spoken of as over-careful in money matters. Certainly
he was not careless or wasteful. He knew that common
sense applies to giving as to other things, and he was
not Uable to the reproach implied in his comment on a
fellow-actor: "It was said of hun that he was generous
to a fault; and I think he must have been, for he never
paid his washerwoman," " Jefferson paid his own
washerwoman, before he helped other people's.
In human traits of a less practical order he was even
richer. In company he was cordial, gay, sympathetic,
amusing. He was an admirable story-teller, acted his
narrative as well as spoke it, apologized for repeating
himseff, as good story-teUers too often do not, but
made old anecdotes seem new by the freshness of his
invention in detaU. He was tolerant of the talk of
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JOSEPH JEFFERSON
others, even of bores, even of impertinent interviewers,
and all agree that he was an excellent listener. He knew
that in our hurried, ignorant world those who listen
are those who learn.
In the more intimate relations of life Jefferson's
tenderness was always evident. He was twice married
and had children by both wives and his family life was
full of charm, I do not know that this can be better
illustrated than by his daughter-in-law's story of his
once enlarging upon the hideousness of the old idea of
God as jealous and angry. This, he said, violated all
the beauty of the true relation between parent and
child. Whereupon one of his sons remarked, "You
never taught us to be afraid of you, father," *' Jeffer
son's affection for those who were gone seems to have
had a peculiar tenacity and loyalty. Of his elder half-
brother, Charles, especially, he always spoke with such
vivid feeling that you felt that the memory was a.
clinging presence in his life.
His devotion to the friends who were with him in the
flesh was equally sincere and attractive. The relation
with the Clevelands naturally commands the most
attention, and it is as creditable to one side as to the
other, Jefferson understood perfectly his friend's great
position in the world. He was absolutely indifferent to
it, so far as the free, intimate commerce of daily inter
course went; yet never for one instant did he presume
upon it for any purpose of seff-exaltation or self-
aggrandizement, I do not know where this is more
delightfully illustrated than in the words of Gilder, the
close friend of both men, writmg to Mrs, Cleveland:
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AMERICAN PORTRAITS
"I have just spent the night at Joseph Jefferson's;
he was as angelic as ever, and speaks of yourseff and
the President always with that refinement of praise
that honors the praised doubly — with that deep
respect mingled with an affectionate tone, free of
famiUarity, that makes one feel like taking off one's
hat whenever he says 'the President' or Mrs. 'Cleve
land.'"" The same sensibility that marks Jefferson's human
relations shows in all his enjoyment of life. He liked
pleasant things, pretty things. He was moderate in
his eating, but he appreciated good food in good com
pany. He liked to build houses and fiU them with what
was charming. He was too shrewd to be lavish, too
shrewd to think that lavishness makes happiness.
But he knew how to select the beautiful with delicacy
and grace. He loved music, though here his taste was
rather simple, and he quoted with relish "BUI" Nye's
remark about Wagner, "My friend Wagner's music is
really much better than it sounds." ^^ He adored
painting, studied it closely, and collected it as exten
sively as his means would allow, at times perhaps a
little more so. His love for nature has already appeared
with his painting. It was inexhaustible, and one of the
best things Winter ever said about him was, "No
other actor has expressed in art, as he did, the spirit of
humanity in intimate relation with the spirit of physi
cal nature." ®®
The sensitive and emotional quality that belonged
to his aesthetic feeling was very evident m Jefferson's
religious attitude. It does not appear that he had done
218

JOSEPH JEFFERSON
any elaborate or systematic thinking upon such sub
jects and he did not trouble himself greatly with the
external formalities of religion. "For sectarian creeds
he entertained a profound contempt," says Winter,
"and upon clergymen, as a class, he looked with dis
trust and aversion." " But he had an instinctive lean
ing toward a spiritual view of life. Immortality was
not only a theory with him, but an actual, vivid fact;
so that he seemed constantly to feel about him the
presence of those whom he had lost. In this he re
sembled the Swedenborgians, to whose doctrines he
was favorable, without perhaps knowing much about
them. He carried his receptiveness for spiritual phe
nomena to the verge of credulity, at the same time
always tingeing and correcting it with his wholesome
humor and irony. Once he came into the company of
Cleveland just as some other person present was teU-
ing something a little difficult for ordinary minds to
swallow. "Ah," cried Cleveland, "teU that to Jeffer
son: he'U believe anything." And Jefferson answered,
"Of course I will. The world is full of wonders, and
another, more or less, does not surprise me." ®*
What is winning about Jefferson's religion is its
cheerfulness, serenity, and love. To be as happy as
possible one's seff and especially to make others happy,
was the cardinal doctrine of it, and I do not know that
it can be improved upon. Above aU, he was an enemy
to fear. He told Miss Shaw "that everything that was
detrimental either to the physical or the spiritual
health of humanity had its origin in fear. And this he
believed in casting out entirely. ... He told me that
219

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
he had labored for years with this end in view, believ
ing that the conquering of fear would harmonize his
character as much as it was possible for him to do." "
Evidently there was some struggle about this, and
the interest of Jefferson's cheerfulness and optimism
lies largely in the fact that they were not a matter of
temperament, but a matter of will. His was not the
easy-going, Bohemian carelessness, which takes for
tune and misfortune with equal indifference. He Uked
joy and laughter and sought them and cultivated them.
But he was sensitive and capable of suffering intensely.
There was a strain of melancholy in him, all the more
subtle for being controUed. When some one classed
him as an optimist, he protested : "No — no, he is mis
taken, I am not an optimist. I too often let things
sadden me." ^° Ugliness he hated. Decay he hated.
"I cannot endure destruction of any kind." " Old age
he hated, never would admit that he was old, kept his
heart youthful, at any rate. The secret of life, he knew,
is looking forward, and he filled his spirit full of the
things that look forward, to this life or another. Thus
it was that he loved gardens and flowers. "The saddest
thing in old age," he said to Mr. Wflson, "is the ab
sence of expectation. You no longer look forward to
things. Now a garden is all expectation" — here his
thought took the humorous turn so characteristic of
him — "and you often get a lot of things you don't
expect." Then he returned to the serious. "Therefore
I have become a gardener. My boy, when you are past
seventy, don't forget to cultivate a garden. It is all
expectation." " 220

JOSEPH JEFFERSON
This delightful blending of laughter and pathos, of
tendemess and irony, coupled with Jefferson's con
stant association with the stage, makes one connect
him irresistibly with the clowns of Shakespeare.
Touchstone and Feste and the fool of Lear are not
fools in the ordinary sense. Their keenness, their ap
prehension, theu subtlety are often, in specific cases,
much beyond those of common mortals. It is simply
that they take with seriousness matters which the chil
dren of this world think trifling and see as trifles under
the haunting aspect of eternity those solemn passions
and efforts which grave human creatures regard as the
important interests of life. With this airy, gracious,
fantastic temper Jefferson had always something in
common, however practical he might be when a com
pelling occasion called for it. He loved dolls, and toy
shops, would spend hours in them, watching the chil
dren and entering into their ecstasy. He would stand
before the wuidows and put chatter into the doUs'
mouths. "Look at that old fool taking up his tune
staring and laughing at us. I wonder if he thinks we
have no feeUngs." "Isn't this a sloppy sort of day for
doUs? Not even fit to look out of the window!"
"Hello, Margery, who tore your skirt?" '* Don't you
hear Touchstone? Don't you hear Rip Van Winkle?
"At New Orleans," he said to Mr. Wilson, "Eugene
Field and I ranged through the curiosity shops, and
the man would buy dolls and such things." And Wilson
told him that "Field said he never saw a man like
Jefferson — that his eye was caught with aU sorts of
gewgaws, and that he sunply squandered money on
221

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
trffles." And Jefferson chuckled, "That's it: one haff
the world thinks the other half crazy," '*
So the solution and dissolution of all Iffe, with its
passion and effort and despair and hope, in quaint and
tender laughter bring Jefferson fully into the company
of the chUdren of dream. Mark Twam, with his vast
wandering, his quest of fortune, his touching of all
men's hands and hearts, was a thing of dream, and
confessed it. Emily Dickinson, shut off in her white
Amherst solitude, daughter of thoughts and flowers,
was a thing of dream, and knew it. With Jefferson the
very nature of stage life made the dream even more
insistent and pervading. And on the stage to act one
part, over and over, tfll the identities of actor and
acted were mingled inseparably! And to have that
part Rip Van Winkle, a creature of dream, ff ever
human being was !
And Jefferson himself recognized this flavor of
dream again and again. He liked the strange, the
mysterious, the mystical, preferred to seek the expla
nation of natural things in supernatural causes. The
actor's glory, so immense, so all-involving for a mo
ment, does it not flit away into oblivion, like a bubble
or a dream? Trifles all, toys all, diversions of dolls, and
fit for doUs to play with! "Is anything worth while?"
he said. "What, perhaps, does the best or worst any
of us can do amount to in this vast conglomeration
of revolving worlds? On the other hand, isn't every
thing worth whUe? Is not the smallest thing of im
portance?" " So he mocked and meditated, as Feste
might have done in the gardens of Olivia, while Su:
222

JOSEPH JEFFERSON
Toby drank, and Viola and Orsino caressed and kissed.
He loved to sum up his own and all life in a phrase of
Seneca: "Life is Uke a play upon the stage; it signifies
not.how long it lasts, but how well it is acted. Die when
or where you wiU, think only on making a good exit." "
But I am sure, if he had known them, he would have
preferred the magnificent lines with which Fitzgerald
euds his translation of the great dream play of Calderon :
" Such a doubt
Confounds and clouds our mortal life about.
And, whether wake or dreaming, this I know.
How dream-wise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary tenure not to break.
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake.
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disordered insolence and passion quell.
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he played.
Whether To-morrow's dawn shall break the spell, "
Or the Last Trumpet of the eternal Day,
When Dreaming with the Night shall pass away.*

NOTES

NOTES
The notes to each chapter are preceded by a list of the most
important works referred to, with the abbreviations used.
I: MARK TWAIN
Paine, Albert Bigelow, Mark Twain; A Biography,
three volumes, paged continuously. Biography.
Twain, Mark, Letters, arranged with comment by
Albert Bigelow Paine, two volumes, paged contin
uously. Letters.
Twain, Mark, Works, Hillcrest Edition, twenty-five
volumes. (This edition is not complete, but is
quoted for all writings contained in it.) Works.
1. Letters, p, 128,
2. Letters, p. 643.
3. Biography, p. 241.
4. Biography, p. 146.
5. Biography, p. 109.
6. Works, vol. vi, p. 234.
7. Letters, p. 416.
8. Biography, p. 1328.
9. Letters, p. 734.
10. Biography, p. 1256.
11. Biography, p. 773.
12. Letters, p. 543.
13. Works, vol. v, p. 119.
14. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review,
vol. CLXXXV, p. 121.
15. W. D. Howells, My Mark Twain, p. 178.
16. Biography, p. 844.
17. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review.
vol. CLXXXV, p. 5.
18. Biography, p. 1366.
19. Works, vol. xiii, p. 279.
20. Mark Twain, What is Man and Other Essays, p. 75,
21. Letters, p. 337. 227

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
22. Biography, p. 1451.
23. Letters, p. 527.
24. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review,
vol. CLXxxiii, p. 457.
25. Letters, p. 528.
26. Mark Twain, Speeches, p. 32.
27. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review,
vol. cLXXxtii, p. 583.
28. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, p. 150.
29. Biography, p. 1292.
II: HENRY ADAMS
Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams;
An Autobiography. Education.
Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Saint-Michel.
1. Education, p. 314.
2. Education, p. 68.
3. Education, p. 9.
4. Education, p. 34.
5. Education, p. 64.
6. Education, p. 59.
7. Education, p. 66.
8. Education, p. 56,
' 9. Education, p. 65,
10. Education, p. 70.
11. Education, p. 76.
12. Education, p. 77,
13. Education, p. 78.
14. Education, p. 79.
15. Education, p. 75.
16. Education, p. 81.
17. Henry Cabot Lodge, Early Memories, p. 186.
18. Education, p. 300.
19. Ibid.
20. Education, p. 307.
21. William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John
Hay, vol. ii, p. 55.
22. William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John
Hay, vol. ii, p. 61. 228

NOTES
23. Education, p. 105.
24. Education, p. 118.
25. Ibid.
26. Education, p. 307.
27. Education, p. 85.
28. Education, p. 353.
29. Saint-Michel, p. 198.
30. Education, p. 443.
31. Education, p. 106.
32. Education, p. 108.
33. Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece, p. 4.
34. Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece, p. 16.
35. Education, p. 170.
36. Education, p. 175.
37. Preface to A Letter to American Teachers of History, in
The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, p. 138.
38. Education, p. 394,
39. Education, p. 90.
40. Ibid.
41. Education, p. 285.
42. Education, p. 351.
43. Education, p. 413.
44. Education, p. 357.
45. Education, p. 420.
46. Education, p. 220.
47. Saint-Michel, p. 213.
48. Saint-Michel, p. 178.
49. Education, p. 232.
50. Education, p. 68.
51. Education, p. 255.
52. Education, p. 369.
53. Saint-Michel, p. 9.
54. Education, p. 81.
55. Letters to a Niece, p. 18.
56. Saint-Michel, p. 166.
57. Education, p. 352.
58. Education, p. 424.
59. Education, p. 381.
60. Saint-Michel, p. 111.
61. Education, p. 95, 229

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
62. Education, p. 441.
63. Beth Bradford Gilchrist, The Life of Mary Lyon, p. 198.
HI: SIDNEY LANIER
Lanier, Sidney, Letters. Letters.
Lanier, Sidney, Poems (edition 1900). Poems.
Mims, Edwin, Sidney Lanier. Mims.
1. Letters, p. 14 (condensed).
2. Letters, p. 114.
3. Mims, p. 153.
4. To Northrupp, June 11, 1866, in Lippincott's Magazine,
vol. Lxxv, p. 307.
5. Mims, p. 5.
6. Mims, p. 321.
7. Letters, p. 51.
8. The Letters of Thomas Gray (ed. Tovey), vol. i, p. 150.
9. Letters, p. 132.
10. Mims, p. 157.
11. Mims, p. 91,
12. Letters, p. 46,
13. Ibid.
14. Mims, p. 321.
15. Mims, p. 125.
16. Poems, p. xxii.
17. To Northrupp, July 28, 1866, in Lippincott's Magazine,
vol. LXXV, p. 310,
18. Letters, p. 79.
19. Letters, p. 73,
20. Mims, p. 39.
21. Mims, p. 303.
22. Mims, p. 31.
23. Letters, p. 103,
24. Ibid.
25. Sidney Lanier, Poem Outlines, p. 18.
26. Mims, p. 96.
27. Letters, p. 154.
28. Letters, p. 77.
29. Sidney Lanier, Retrospects and Prospects, p. 5.
30. Poems, p. 143. 230

NOTES
31. Sidney Lanier, Poem Outlines, p, 104.
32. Utters, p. 168.
33. Letters, p. 194.
34. Letters, p. 13.
35. Letters, p. 226.
36. Letters, p. 50.
37. Mims, p. 6.
38. Letters, p. 107.
39. Mims, p. 310.
40. Letters, p. 184.
41. Mims, p. 35.
42. Letters, p. 171.'
43. Mims, p. 66.
44. Letters, p. 71.
45. Letters, p. 84.
46. Letters, p. 133.
47. Mims, p. 308.
48. Letters, p. 224,
49. Letters, p. 106.
50. Ibid.
51. Letters, p. 109.
52. Letters, p. 68.
53. Mims, p. 330.
54. Mims, p. 145.
55. Letters, p. 66.
56. Letters, p. 238.
57. Poems, p. 31,
58. Letters, p. 78.
59. Poems, p. 246.
IV: JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
Menpes, Mortuner, Whistler as I Knew Him. Menpes.
Pennell, E. R. and J., The Life of James McNeill
Whistler, sixth edition, revised. Pennell.
Seitz, Don Carlos. Whistler Stories. Seitz.
Whistler, James McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies. Gentle Art.
1. Seitz, p. 27.
2. Seitz, p. 70. 231

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
3. Menpes, p. 63.
4. Pennell, p. 358.
5. Pennell, p. 412,
6. Gentle Art, p. 29.
7. Pennell, p. 404.
8. Pennell, p. 138.
9. Frederick Keppel, One Day with Whistler, p, 8.
10. Menpes, p. 8.
11. Pennell, p. 323.
12. Menpes, p. 7.
13. Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 244.
14. Menpes, p. 140.
15. Menpes, p. 43,
16. Menpes, p. 38,
17. Pennell, p. 343.
18. Otto H. Bacher, With Whistler in Venice, p. 157.
19. Chris Healy, Confessions of a Journalist, p. 203.
20. Pennell, p. 237.
21. Trilby, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. lxxxviii,
p. 577.
22. Pennell, p. 211,
23. Menpes, p. 132.
24. Pennell, p. 366.
25. Seitz, p. 73.
26. John C. Van Dyke, American Painting and Its Tradition,
p. 173.
27. Alexander Harrison quoted by Frank Harris, Contempo
rary Portraits, p. 80.
28. Pennell, p. 105.
29. Menpes, p. 37.
30. Pennell, p. 205. So in first edition, somewhat altered in
sixth.
31. Menpes, p. 10.
32. Menpes, p. 33.
33. Pennell, p. 104.
34. Pennell, p. 119.
35. Pennell, p. 323.
36. Menpes, p. 117.
37. John C. Van Dyke, American Painting and Its Tradition,
p. 173. 232

NOTES
38. Seitz, p. 33.
39. Seitz, p. 45.
40. Gentle Art, p. 115.
41. Pennell, p. 409.
42. Sir Walter Raleigh, Speech at Opening of Whistler Me
morial Exhibition, p. 10.
43. Menpes, p. 10.
44. Pennell, p. 285.
45. Pennell, p. 422.
46. Pennell, p. 300,
47. Pennell, p. 277.
48. T. Martin Wood, Whistler, p. 20,
49. Pennell, p. 117.
50. J. K. Huysmans, Certains, p. 69.
51. Pennell, p. 222.
52. Seitz, p. 119.
53. Pennell, p. 284,
54. Pennell, p. 402,
55. Seitz, p. 120.
V: JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE
Blaine, Mrs. James G., Letters, edited by Harriet
S. Blaine Beale, two volumes. Mrs. Blaine,
Conwell, R. H., The Life and Public Services of
James G. Blaine. Conwell.
Hamilton, Gail, Biography of James G. Blaine. Hamilton,
Stanwood, Edward, James Gillespie Blaine. Stanwood.
The letters to Warren Fisher, Jr., are printed in full
in Mr. Blaine's Record : The Investigation of 1876
and The Mulligan Letters, Published by the Com
mittee of One Hundred. (Boston.)
1. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 214,
2. Hamilton, p. 492.
3. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 218.
4. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 136.
5. Hamilton, p. 469,
6. Hamilton, p. 301,
7. Conwell, p. 392.
8. Conwell, p. 89. 233

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
9. Hamilton, p. 620.
10. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 303,
11. Hamilton, p. 532.
12. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 36.
13. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii. p. 121.
14. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 135,
15. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 183.
16. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 185. Sentences transposed,
17. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 220.
18, Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 131.
19. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 16.
20. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 191.
21. Hamilton, p. 455.
22. Hamilton, p. 225.
23. Hamilton, p. 245.
24. Hamilton, p. 467.
25. Hamilton, p. 300.
26. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 185.
27 Hamilton, p. 536.
28. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i,
p. 378.
29. Andrew Dickson White. Autobiography, vol. i, p. 214.
30 George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i,
p. 200.
31 Hamilton, p. 707.
32 Stanwood, p. 109.
33. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from
Hayes to McKinley, p. 321.
34. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 292.
35. Conwell, p. 67.
36. Conwell, p. 86.
37. Hamilton, p. 436.
38. A neighbor of Blaine's, in Conwell, p. 87.
39. Hamilton, p. 107.
40. Hamilton, p. 581.
41. Hamilton, p. 147.
42. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i,
p. 200.
43. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 137.
44. Stanwood, p. 361. 234

NOTES
45. Hamilton, p. 633.
46. Note in Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 13.
47. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 277.
48. Hamilton, p. 477.
49. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 72.
50. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 159.
51. To Fisher, October 1, 1871.
52. To Fisher, August 9, 1872.
53. To Fisher, October 4, 1869.
54. To Fisher, June 29, 1869.
55. Fisher to Blaine, April 16, 1872.
56. Stanwood, p. 162.
57. Enclosure in Blaine to Fisher. April 16, 1876.
58. Speech of April 24, 1876. In Congressional Record, Forty
Fourth Congress, 1st Session, vol. rv, part 3, p. 2725.
59. Hamilton, p. 395.
60. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. ii, p. 170.
61. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the
Compromise of 1850, vol. vii, p. 205.
62. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i,
p. 281.
63. Hamilton, p. 432.
64. Congressional Record, June 5, 1876, Forty-Fourth Con-
fe- gress, 1st Session, vol. rv, part 4, p. 3606.
65. Hamilton, p. 424,
66. Hamilton, p. 536.
67, Stanwood, p. 342.
68. James G. Blaine, Political Discussions, p. 465.
69. Mrs. Blaine, vol. ii, p. 120. For a curious discussion of the
attitude of Mrs. Blaine toward the possibility of her
husband's nomination in a later campaign see These
Shifting Scenes, by Charles Edward Russell, chapter vii.
VI: GROVER CLEVELAND
Black, Chauncey F., The Lives of Grover Cleve- .
land and Thomas A. Hendricks. Black.
Cleveland, Grover, Fishing and Shooting
Sketches. Fishing Sketches.
Cleveland, Grover, The Writings and Speeches
235

AMERICAN, PORTRAITS
of Grover Cleveland, Selected and edited by
George F. Parker. Writings.
Gilder, Richard Watson, Grover Cleveland; A
Record of Friendship. Gilder.
Parker, George F., Recollections of Grover Cleve
land. Parker.
West, Andrew F., article in Century, volume
lxxvii, January, 1909, Grover Cleveland: A
Princeton Memory. West.
Williams, Jesse Lynch Williams, Mr. Cleve
land, A Personal Impression. Williams,
1, Henry Watterson, "Morse Henry," an Autobiography, vol.
II, p. 118.
2. Writings, p. 338.
3. Parker, p. 391.
4. Black, p. 43.
5. Fishing Sketches, p. 45.
6. Gilder, p. 171.
7. West, p. 328.
8. West, p. 326.
9. Black, p. 63.
10. Parker, p. 382.
11. Gilder, p. 48.
12. Gilder, p. 249,
13, Williams, pp. 24, 25.
14. West, p. 336.
15. Fishing Sketches, p. 53.
16. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. ii, p. 326.
17. Gilder, p. 192.
18. Parker, p. 377.
19. Williams, p. 61.
20. Speech to Grover Cleveland Association in New York,
March 18, 1919, in Boston Transcript, March 19,
1919.
21. Fishing Sketches, p. 13.
22. James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage, act rv, scene 1.
23. For this story I am indebted to my wife, who observed
the incident.
24. Gilder, p. 47. 236

NOTES
25. Frederick E. Goodrich. The Life and Public Services of
Grover Cleveland, p. 74.
26. Ibid.
27. Gilder, p. 259.
28. Writings, p. 534.
29. Leonard Wood, in Speech to Grover Cleveland Associa
tion in New York, March 18, 1919, in Boston Tran
script, March 19, 1919.
30. Williams, p. 11.
31. Writings, p. 212.
32. James D. Richardson. Messages and Papers of the Presi
dents, vol. VIII. p. 450. "
33. Fishing Sketches, p. 28.
34. Fishing Sketches, p. 30.
35. Gilder, p. 36.
36. Williams, p. 31.
37. Gilder, p. 30.
38. Fishing Sketches, p. 106.
39. Gilder, p. 49.
40. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. ii, p. 344.
41. Black, p. 61.
42. Gilder, p. 169.
43. Parker, p. 35.
44. Parker, p. 341.
45. Writings, p. 264.
46. Parker, p. 210.
47. Parker, p. 335.
48. Messages from the Governors of the State of New York, ed
ited by Charles Z. Lincoln, vol. vii, p. 873.
49. Gilder, p. 30.
50. See Life of General E. S. Bragg, supposedly supplied by
himself, in Who 'sfWho in America for 1902.
51. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," an Autobiography, vol.
II, p. 144.
52. Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams, p. 320.
53. To E. P. Wheeler, printed in Sixty Years of American
Life, by Everett P. Wheeler, p. 250.
54. For the history of this expression as finally shaped by
Colonel Lamont see Parker, pp. 43, 44.
55. Gail Hamilton, Biography of James G. Blaine, p. 515.
237

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
56. Writings, p. 86.
57. Fishing Sketches, p. 87.
58. Parker, p. 349.
59. Parker, p. 105.
60. James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Pres
idents, vol. VIII, p. iv.
61. Gilder, p. 191.
62. West, p. 336.
63. Gilder, p. 190.
64. Gilder, p. 179,
65, Gilder, p. 270.
VII: HENRY JAMES
James. Henry, Letters, Selected and edited by
Percy Lubbock, two volumes. Letters.
James, Henry, The Novels and Tales of Henry
James, Charles Scribner's Sons, twelity-six
volumes. (This edition, with prefaces and
extensive revision by the author, does not
comprise all of James's works, but is quoted
for all writings contained in it.) Works.
James, Henry, Notes of a Son and Brother. Son and Brother.
James, Henry, A Smcill Boy and Others. Small Boy.
1. Letters, vol. i, p. 165,
2. Henry James, The Art of Fiction (printed with an essay
by Walter Besant on the same subject), p. 66. Also in
Partial Portraits, by Henry James, p. 390.
3. Letters, vol. ii, p. 489.
4. Works, vol. xxiv, p. 349.
5, Works, vol. xxi, p. xxi.
6. Works, vol. xii. p. ix.
7. Small Boy, p. 263.
8. Works, vol. v, p. viii.
9. Irish Essays (edition 1882), p. v.
10. Letters, vol. ii, p. 347.
11. Works, vol. IX, p. v.
12. Letters, vol. i, p. 289.
13. Letters, vol. ii, p. 490.
14, Works, vol. ix, p, 303. 238

NOTES
15. Works, vol, xviii, p. 422,
16. Letters, vol. ii, p. 119.
17. Works, vol. xxi, p. v.
18. Letters, vol. ii, p. 323.
19. Letters, vol. ii, p. 9.
20. William James, Letters, vol. i, p. 41,
21, Letters, vol. ii, p. 11.
22. Theodora Bosanquet. in Yale Review, vol. x, p. 156,
23. Letters, vol. i, p. 310.
24. Letters, vol. i. p. 309.
25. Letters, vol. i, p. 101.
26. Letters, vol. i, p. 115.
27. Letters, vol. i, p. 337.
28. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (English edition.
1878). p. 109.
29. Ibid.
30. Henry James, The American Scene (American edition,
1907), p. 367.
31. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists, p. 175.
32. Letters, vol. i, p. 379.
33. Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, Life and Letters of Stopford
Brooke, vol. ii, p. 672.
34, Letters, vol. i, p. 348. A correspondent writes me that
James's brother Wilkie, commenting upon Henry's im
perfect knowledge of women, declared that he " had never
been in love, and lacked the insight which that experience
gave to a man." Such a general negative as this is some
what difficult to accept, but it is exceedingly suggestive,
35. Son and Brother, p. 324.
36. Letters, vol. i. p. 183.
37. Letters, vol. ii, p. 104.
38. Works, vol. xv, p. 22,
39. Works, vol. v. p. xxi.
40. Letters, vol. i, p. 198.
41. Letters, vol. ii, p. 102.
42. Letters, vol. i, p. 68.
43. Works, vol. ix, p. xxiii.
44. Letters, vol. i, p. 103.
45. Works, vol. x, p. x.
46. Letters, vol. i, p. 409. 239

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
47. Works, vol. x, p. xi.
48. Letters, vol. i, p. 180.
49. Letters, vol. i, p. 173.
50. Letters, vol. i. p. 182.
51. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists, p. 400.
52. Letters, vol. ii, p. 485.
VIII: JOSEPH JEFFERSON
Jefferson, Eugenie Paul. Intimate Recollections
of Joseph Jefferson. Mrs. Jefferson.
Jefferson, Joseph. The Autobiography of Joseph
Jefferson. Autobiography.
Wilson, Francis, Joseph Jefferson. Wilson.
Winter, William, Life and Art of Joseph Jeffer
son. Winter, Life.
Winter, William, Other Days. Other Days.
1. Winter, Life, p. 136.
2. Autobiography, p. 115.
3. Winter, Life, p. 15.
4. Other Days, p. 88.
5. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 204.
6. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," An Autobiography,
vol. II, p. 183.
7. Winter, Life, p. 168.
8. William Winter, Life and Art of Edwin Booth (edition,
1894), p. 107.
9. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 736.
10. Wilson, p. 330.
11. Autobiography, p. 439.
12. Wilson, p. 28.
13. Autobiography, p. 23.
14. Autobiography, p. 101.
15. Autobiography, p. 303.
16. Other Days, p. 81.
17. Autobiography, p. 118.
18. Autobiography, p. 101.
19. Autobiography, p. 340.
20, Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p, 731.
240

NOTES
21. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," An Autobiography,
vol. II, p. 185.
22. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxv, p. 382.
23. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 732.
24. Autobiography, p. 402.
25. Winter, Life, p. 195.
26. Other Days, p. 86.
27. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 735.
28. Autobiography, p. 222.
29. Wilson, p. 172.
30. Autobiography, p. 132.
31. Autobiography, p. 303,
32. Wilson, p. 128.
33. Autobiography, p. 115.
34. Wilson, p. 11.
35. Wilson, p. 8.
36. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii. p. 736.
37. Rip Van Winkle as Played by Joseph Jefferson, p. 171.
38. Wilson, p. 68.
39. Autobiography, p. 158.
40. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 169. From an interview reported in the
New York Herald.
41. Ibid.
42. Autobiography, pp. 224-229 and 302-310.
43. Other Days, p. 75.
44. Wilson, p. 25,
45, Autobiography, p. 116.
46. Autobiography, p. 81.
47. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," An Autobiography,
vol. II, p. 173.
48. Wilson, p. 59.
49. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 66.
50. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 70.
51. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 735.
52. Wilson, p. 66,
53. Autobiography, p. 348,
54. Wilson, p. 84.
55. Wilson, p. 307, slightly abbreviated.
56. Eugenie Paul Jefferson, in Outing, vol. liii, p. 739.
57, Wilson, p, 306. 241

AMERICAN PORTRAITS
58. Ibid.
59. Other Days, p. 86.
60. Other Days, p. 87,
61, Wilson, epigraph of book.
62. Autobiography, p. 216.
63. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 216.
64. Richard Watson Gilder, Letters, p. 162.
65. Wilson, p. 214.
66. Other Days, p. 78,
67. Other Days, p. 86.
68. Other Days, p. 78.
69. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxv, p. 381.
70. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 211,
71. Autobiography, p. 381.
72. Wilson, p. 341.
73. Wilson, p. 13.
74. WUson, p. 244.
75. Wilson, p. 321.
76. Autobiography, p. 474.

INDEX

INDEX

Adams, Henry, 69, 71, 112, 154;
Chronology, 30; never educated,
31 , 32 ; his idea of the object of ed
ucation, 31; his definition of a
teacher, 32, 33; a student at Har
vard, 33; in Germany, 34, 35; a
teacher at Harvard, 35, 36; his
salon in Washington, 37; his gen
eral human relations, 37, 38; fared
better with women than with men,
38, 39; his friendships, 39, 40; his
marriage, 40; in London during
the Civil War, 41, 42; his political
experience in America, 42, 43; a
true conservative, 42, 44; his view
of the workings of American gov
ernment, 43; traveled extensively,
43-45; gained little from art, 45,
46, 53; Mont-Saint-Michd and
Chartres, 46; his interest in Dar
winism, 47, 48, 50; lacked lucidity,
48-50; his theory of acceleration,
49; a Darwinian for fun, 50; as an
author, 51, 53; lacked seriousness,
51; had little enthusiasm, 52, 53;
his attitude toward religion, 54;
inherited too much ^otism, 54,
55; mistrusted simplicity, 56;
needed to be de-educated, 56; on
Presidents Harrison and Cleve
land, 164.
Aldrich, Nelson W., 120.
Arnold, Matthew, 177.
Bacher, Otto H., on Whistler, 93.
Balzac, Honor6, 176, 185.
Barker, Dr., 119.
BirreU, Augustine, on Mark Twain,
23. 24-
Blaine, Emmons, 120.
Blaine, James Gillespie, 167; Chro
nology, 114; as seen by his wife,

115, 116, 119-21; his whole life
political, 116; intensely active
intellectually, 116, 117; a master
of words, 117, 135; his religion,
118; cared little for art, 118, 119;
his sensibility profound, 1 19; mor
bid about his health, 119, 120;
devoted to his wife and children,
121-23; his social qualities, 123,
124; a consummate politician,
124, 128; his personal charm, 125;
his remarkable memory, 126, 127;
a magnetic man, 127; a natural
leader, 127, 128; his statesman
ship, 128-30; his financial career,
130-38; congressional investiga
tion, 134, 135; his fundamental
error, 137; his ambition for the
presidency, 138-40.
Blaine, Mrs. J. G., her letters quoted,
115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123,
128, 130, 131, 140.
Bosanquet, Miss, Henry James's sec
retary, 183, 184.
Boston, solved the universe, 33.
Boucicault, Dion, 211.
Bourget, Paul, 179.
Bragg, Gen. E. S., 164.
Browning, Robert, 179.
Burchard, Rev. Samuel D., 139.
Burlingame, Anson, 127.
Burton, Lady, and Whistler, 90.
Calderon, Pedro, 223.
Carlisle, John G., 170.
Cellini, Benvenuto, Whistler com
pared to, 94.
Chesterfield, Lord, 126.
Chesterton, G. K., on Whistler, 94.
97. loi.
Cibber, Colley, a saying of Dr. John
son about, 99,

245

INDEX

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, see
Twain, Mark.
Cleveland, Stephen Grover, Chro
nology, 144; his early life, 145, 148,
150; earnestly devoted to his task,
146; nominated for the presidency,
147; lacking in cultivation, 148;
his manner of writing, 149; his
spiritual and religious attitude,
15O1 15I1 169; indifferent to art,
151; an ardent fisherman and
hunter, 152, 153; loved children,
I53i 154; Fishing and Shooting
Sketches, quoted, 154, 158; simple
and frugal, 154, 155; very gener
ous, 155; his friendship and per
sonal affection, 156, 157; his hu
mor, 157, 158, 160; unpopular,
159; had great public merits, 160;
thoroughly democratic, 160, 161 ;
his speeches, 161; had superb
physical strength, 162; an intense
psirty man, 162, 163; his enemies,
164; what he stands for in Ameri
can history, 165-70; essentially a
conservative, 166; his Presidential
Problems, 167; the strong features
of his character, 167, 168; his use
of the veto power, 168, 169; his
passionate Americanism, 169, 170;
on Joseph Jefferson, 200 ; friendship
with Jefferson, 213, 215, 217, 219.
Cleveland, Mrs. Grover, 115, 155,
217, 2i8.
Committee of One Hundred, on
Blaine, 136.
Corot, Jean Baptiste, 215.
Cowper, William, quoted, in.
Delane, John T., and Henry Adams,
41, 42.
Democratic party, principles of, 166.
Dickinson, Emily, 222.
Dream, the element of, in Mark
Twain, 7, 9-11, 13; in Joseph Jef
ferson, 222; in Emily Dickinson,
222.
Du Maurier, George, 97.

Eden, Sir WiUiam, and Whistler,
95. 98.
Elkins, Stephen B., 140.
Famsworth, General, 147.
Field, Eugene, and Joseph Jefferson,
221.
Finn, Huck, 15, 16.
Fisher, Warren, Jr., and J. G. Blaine,
132-34, 138, 139.
Fitzgerald, Edward, quoted, 223.
Flaubert, Gustave, 78, 81.
Fletcher, Phineas, quoted, 78.
Franklin, Benjamin, 20.
Friends, born, not made, 39.
Garfield, President James A., 167;
Blaine's eulogy on, 117, 119.
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 56.
Gautier, Th^ophile, 112.
Gay, Walter, on Whistler at work,
103.
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The,
96, 99, 100.
German teaching, Henry Adams's
opinion of, 35.
Gilder, Richard Watson, 156, 217.
God, Mark Twain's idea of, 25, 26;
his place in ^he education of
Henry Adams, 54; Whistler's feel
ing about, 90.
Gray, Thomas, on money, 63, 64.
Haden, Sir Seymour, 95, 96.
Harrison, President Benjamin, 164.
Harvard College, "a good school,"
33; education at, 36, 38.
Hay, John, and Henry Adams, 39;
on Blaine, 125.
Heine, Heinrich, 95.
Hiscock, Frank, 120.
History of the tfnited States, Henry
Adams's, 51.
Hoar, Senator George F., on Blaine,
117, 124, 128, 130, 137.
Howells, William Dean, 182; on
Mark Twain, 14.
Huysmans, J. K, on Whistler, 108.

246

INDEX

IngersoU, Robert G., 17.
Innocents Abroad, The, 3.
James, Henry, Chronology, 172;
sincere in life and art, 173, 187; a
tireless observer, 174; cared more
for expression than for the thing
expressed, 174, 175; puzzled by
America, 176, 177; indifferent to
fact, 177, 178; strains and forces
words, 179, 180; had little life
apart from his art, 181-84, 189;
his spiritual attitude, 184, 185;
his conversation, 186, 187; his
strong human affection, 187-89;
passionately interested in the
Great War, 189; his real existence,
in his art, 189-92; not a popular
novelist, 192, 194; as a dramatist,
192-94; not emljittered by neglect
or criticism, 194, 195; generous
toward his fellow-writers, 195,
196.
James, William, 182.
Jefferson, Joseph, 156; Chronology,
198; came of a theatrical family,
199; kept his own nature high and
pure, 200, 201 ; a friend of Grover
Cleveland, 200, 213, 215, 217,
219; had definite views about his
art, 201 ; gave careful attention to
the audience, 201, 202; had keen
sensibilities, 202; a good finan
cier, 203, 216; enjoyed practical
jokes, 203, 204; his relations with
fellow-actors, 203-06; accused of
wanting all the stage, 206; had
an immense ambition, 207; knew
both failure and success, 208; his
triumph, 209-1 1 ; Rip Van Winkle,
211; his Autobiography, 2 12 ; his ac
quaintance with books, 213; fond
of sport, 213; an ardent painter,
214, 215; wisely generous, 216;
an admirable story-teller, 216; his
family life, 217; devoted to his
friends, 217; his religious attitude,
218-20; knew the secret of life,

220; loved dolls, 221; was a child
of dream, 222.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, on Colley
Cibber, 99; on flattery, 209.
Keats, John, 78, 80, 112.
Keppel, Frederick, and Whistler
92.
King, Clarence, and Henry Adams,
39-
La Farge, Mrs. Mabel, 40.
Lamb, Charles, 158.
Lamont, Col. Daniel S., 147.
Lang, Andrew, and Mark Twain,
21, 22.
Lanier, Sidney, 112; Chronology, 60;
lived in a spiritual whirlwind, 61;
his military experiences, 61, 62; a
tuberculous invalid, 62, 63; im
poverished by the war, 63, 64; his
love of poetry and music, 64, 65,
72. 75> 76; craved recognition, 66,
67, 77; full of ardor, 68, 69; his
critical writings, 69, 70; his hours
of peace, 71, 72; loved a good
horse, 73; loved the repose of Na
ture, 73; his humor, 74; could not
stay angry, 75; his affection for
his wife and children, 76, 77; his
ambition, 77, 78; burned to make
others feel what he felt, 79; the
results of his struggle, 80, 8i ; al
ways a Southerner, 80, 81; his
poems, 81-83.
Lee, Robert E., 27, 154.
Leopardi, Giacomo, 16.
Letter to Teachers of American His
tory, A, by Henry Adams, 48.
Lincoln, Abraham, 20, 154, 170.
Little Rock and Fort Smith Rail
road, the, 132, 133.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 39; on Henry
Adams, 36.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, lov
able and beloved, 100.
Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 137,
153. 160.

247

INDEX

Lucretius, Lanier compared to, 69,
70, 81, 82.
Lyon, Mary, 56, 57.
Macbeth, Lady, 116.
McKinley, President William, 157,
164.
Matthews, Charles J., 206.
Menpes, Mortimer, on Whistler, 89,
93, 94, loi, 103.
Meux, Lady, and Whistler, 98.
Milnes, Richard Monckton, and
Henry Adams, 41.
Milton, John, 94; on fame, 78.
Mont-Saint-Michd and Chartres, by
Henry Adams, 46, 49, 54.
Moore, George, 95, 96.
More, Hannah, 209.
Mulligan, James, 134.
Music, the art of struggle, 72; de
pends on human emotion, 107,
no.
Nye, "Bill," 218.
Old Times on the Mississippi, 3.
Raphael, his friendly courtesy, 100.
Republican party, principles of, l66.
Rhodes, James Ford, 137.
Richardson, James D., 168.
Rip Van Winkle, 207, 210, 21 1,
Root, Elihu, on Blaine, 129,
Roughing It, 3.
Saint Ives, 95.
Schumann, Robert, Lanier's criti
cism of, 68, 69.
Seneca, quoted, 223.
Seward, William H., 126, 129, 162.
Shakespeare, William, his clowns,
221, 222.
Shaw, Mary, and Joseph Jefferson,
202, 207, 209, 219.
Sherman, Gen. W. T., on Blaine,
129.
Speculation, two times when a man
should not venture on, 7.

Stanwood, Edward, 139.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 22.
Sumner, Charles, 34.
Swift, Jonathan, 97.
Teacher, Henry Adams's definition
of a, 32, 33; affects eternity, 36.
Ten O'clock, Whistler's, 90, 91,
Thought, carnivorous, 69.
TUden, Samuel J., 162.
TroUope, Anthony, 176.
Twain, Mark, 69, 112, 222; Chronol
ogy, 2; not to be judged by or
dinary standards, 3; his way of
working, 4; liked literary glory, 4,
10; something of the bard about
him, 4; essentially a journalist, 5;
his early days, 5-7; walked the
city roofs with Artemus Ward, 6;
his energy, 6; followed his fancies,
6; wanted money for what it
brings, 7,9; loved to take a chance,
7, 9; a dreamer, 7, 9, 10, 13; never
settled down, 7; had perfect
health, 8; made friends of all sorts
and conditions of men, 8; his love
and tenderness, 8, 15, 21 ; never a
good calculator, 9; tragedy and
disaster, 10, 11; generally known
as a laugher, 1 1 , 1 2 ; was he a great
humorist, 12, 13, 19; as a thinker,
13, 14, 16-18; his confessions, 15,
20; scrupulous in financial rela
tions, 15; had a trained Presby
terian conscience, 15; trusted
men. 16; lacked great spiritual
resources, 18; thoroughly Ameri
can, 19-21; his appearance, 20;
democratic, 2 1 , 22 ; his best-known
books, 22; his influence on the
masses, 23, 24; an overthrower of
shams, 23, 24; compared to Vol
taire, 24, 27; called a demolisher
of reverence, 24-26; his idea of
God, 25, 26; charged with evil
influence, 26, 27; taken seriously,
he is desolating, 27, 28; his visit to
Whistler, 98.

248

INDEX

Twenty Years in Congress, 117.
Van Dyke, John C, on Whistler,
100, 104.
Vasari, Giorgio, 94, 100.
Voltaire, Frangois, 97; Mark Twain
compared to, 24, 27.
Wagner, Richard, 218.
Ward, Artemus, and Mark Twain, 6.
Watterson, Col. Henry, 164; on
Joseph Jefferson, 200, 213.
Wells, H. G., 196.
West, Andrew F., 152.
Whistler, James McNeiU, 204; Chro
nology, 86; a snarled soul, 87;
anecdotes of, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94,
96, 98, 103, 104; his birth, 88;
drawing and painting his only
serious business, 88; apparently
read little, 89; his attitude toward
religion, 90; his theories about art,
90, 91; knew privation, 91, 92;
the centre of his own universe,
92, 93; his childlikeness, 92-95,
100, 106; his white lock, 93, 94;
liked flattery and resented criti

cism, 95; The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies, 96, 99, 100; an undig
nified writer, 96, 97; liked fighting,
97, 98; his revenge on Sir William
Eden, 98, 99; the Peacock Room,
98, 107; contrasted with Longfel
low and Raphael, 100; did not
like to be alone, loi ; his mother
and his wife, 102, 103; his art,
103-10; his feeling about money,
104; could profit by intelligent
criticism, 104; a hard worker,
105; his instinct of truth, 106;
reveled in decorative richness,
107; his sense of mystery, 108,
III, 112; influenced by Russia,
109; did not appreciate nature,
no.
White, Andrew D., on Blaine, 124.
Wilde, Oscar, and Whistler, 95, 97.
Wilson, Francis, and Joseph Jeffer
son, 209, 212, 220, 221.
Winter, WUliam, on Joseph Jeffer
son, 206, 207, 213, 214, 218, 219.
Woman, the proper study of man
kind, 38.
Wood, Gen. Leonard, 154.