Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

to chant through the nose his translations of the Psalms, but it was woefully puzzled at his salacity, and the town was very soon too hot to hold him in his exile. And as for the common, partial, and ignorant histories of the time, written in our tongue, they generally make him a kind of backslider, who might have been a Huguenot (and-who knows?-have thrown the Sacrament to beasts with the best of them) save that, unhappily, he did not persevere. Whatever they say of him (and some have hardly heard of him) one thing is quite certain: that they do not understand him, and that if they did they would like him still less than they do.

He was national in the rapidity of the gesture of his mind as in that of his body. In his being attracted here and there, watching this and that suddenly, like a bird.

He was national in his power of sharp recovery from any emotion back into his normal balance.

He was national in that he depended upon companions, and stood for a crowd, and deplored all isolation. He was national in that he had nothing strenuous about him, and that he was amiable, and if he had heard of "earnest" men, he would have laughed at them a little, as people who did not see the whole of life.

He was especially national (and it is here that the poet returns) in that most national of all things-a complete sympathy with the atmosphere of the native tongue. Thus men debate a good deal upon the poetic value of Wordsworth, but it is certain, when

The Pilot.

one sees how bathed he is in the sense of English words their harmony and balance, that the man is entirely English, that no other nation could have produced him, and that (alas!) he will be most difficult for foreigners to understand. You will not translate into French or any other language (I quote hopelessly from a memory ten years old)

the stars Creeping along the edges of the hills, Nor can you translate, so as to give its own kind of sweetness

Dieu te doint

Santé bonne-Ma Mignonne.

Apart from this place in letters, see how national he is in what he does! He buys two bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them, visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clément, and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, I think, among another people.

He has the hatred of excess in art which is the chief æsthetic character of the French; he has the tendency to excess in opinion or in general expression which is their chief political fault.

It is thus, then, that I think he should be regarded and that I would desire to present him. It is thus, I am sure, that he should be read if one is to know why he has taken so great a place in the reverence and the history of the French people.

And it is in this aspect that he may worthily introduce much greater things, the Pléiade and Ronsard.

Hilaire Belloc.

THE PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN.

The

The name of William Wetmore Story has come to be (and was indeed before his death, in 1895) associated less with the products of his chisel and pen than with the Barberini Palace, for forty years the centre of English and American society in Rome. The older of "Maga's" readers at least keep a niche in their grateful remembrance for "Graffiti d'Italia," the "Conversations in a Studio," and other writings of his, vivacious and versatile, which first appeared in these pages. Cleopatra and the Libyan Sibyl (to mention the two best known of his marbles only) would seem to have in them the essence of popularity, so far as the work of the sculptor ever is popular, for any uncritical generation, and not merely for that which admired them so ardently in the Roman Court of the Exhibition of 1862. His sculptured memorials of great men, being mostly of the great among his own countrymen, serve as memorials for himself in America chiefly; yet here daily occasion to remember him is given to the thousands who pass and repass his dignified statue of George Peabody, now a little gray and grim, in the shadow of the London Royal Exchange. Fame, however, in its inexorable way, has fixed his place, not for his statues and books, but for his friendships, and justly has associated with him in it his wife. It is not W. W. Story whom it keeps alive so much as "the Storys," as indeed it is they, quite as much at least as the artist and the poet, who live in the letters and records of their circle and contemporaries.

In this verdict Mr. Henry James, Story's biographer,' has acquiesced, we

1 William Wetmore Story and his Friends. From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. By

do not doubt without much hesitation. He does not conceal, but exhibits with an amiable irony, the limitations (as he conceives them) of Story as an artist. With the temperament and the personal and social conditions with which they interacted, these limitations constitute what Mr. James calls Story's "case," and he cannot help weighing and pondering it, as he would one of his own creation, though never, be it said, with any failure in loyalty to a friendship. His portrait, as may be imagined, is not an example of the photographer's inferior art. The obvious features are nowhere obviously rendered. Mr. James never comes any nearer doing that than when he speaks of Story as carrying about with him everywhere in his wide circle "his handsome, charming face, his high animation, his gaiety, jocosity, mimicry, and even more than these things, his interest in ideas, in people, in everything-his vivacity of question, answer, demonstration, disputation." It may as well be said at once that the biography is not specially one to reward the literary ragpicker: the "finds" in it at any rate are not of a scandalous kind. One can anticipate also the objection, which literary collectors and gossips like to keep on tap, that it contains little that is new; the critics in this case referring specially to the provision it makes, or rather fails to make, in the way of "facts." Let us quote here, from the biography itself, Mr. James's recollection, à propos no less person than Abraham Hayward, of a lesson he learned in his earlier London days, the lesson "that the talk easily recognized in London as the best is the delivery and establishment of the

Edinburgh and London: William 1903.

Henry James, Blackwood & Sons.

greatest possible number of facts, or in other words the unwinding, with or without comment or qualification, of the longest possible chain of 'stories."" The passage is to the point, and also admirably exemplifies the alternative fare which Mr. James himself provides:

"One associated Mr. Hayward," he says, "and his recurrent, supereminent laugh thus with the story, and virtually, I noted, with the story alonetaking that product no doubt also, when needful, in the larger sense of the remarkable recorded or disputed contemporary or recent event, cases as to which the speaker was in possession of the 'rights.' What at all events remained with one was a contribution, of a kind, to the general sense that facts, facts, and again facts, were still the thing dearest to the English mind even in its hours of ease. I indeed remember wondering if there were not to be revealed to me, as for the promotion of these hours, some other school of talk, in which some breath of the mind itself, some play of paradox, irony, thought, imagination, some wandering wind of fancy, some draught, in short, of the idea, might not be felt as circulating between the seated solidities, for the general lightening of the mass. This would have been a school handling the fact rather as the point of departure than as the point of arrival, the horse-block for mounting the winged steed of talk rather than as the stable for constantly riding him back to. The 'story,' in fine, in this other order, and surely so more worthy of the name,-would have been the intellectual reaction from the circumstance presented, an exhibition interesting, amusing, vivid, dramatic, in proportion to the agility, or to the sincerity, of the intellect engaged. But this alternative inquiry, I may conclude, I am still conducting."

Readers of this biography will find that Mr. James, at any rate, does not fail to handle the fact as a point of departure; his difficulty rather, as he ruefully admits, is to get back to it as

a point of arrival, once he has mounted his winged steed. Draughts of the idea, wandering winds of fancy, circulate between its solidities, to such a lightening of the mass, indeed, that sometimes it seems it must float above our matter-of-fact heads.

Mr. James, in a word, has essayed in these very charming and individual volumes a task harder even than that of painting a portrait-as opposed to taking a photograph, or as it is vulgarly called, a "likeness"-of an American of high culture and very varied artistic gifts. His ampler purpose is to reproduce Story among his friends, and to reproduce him and them as constituting, or as representing, at least, "a vanished society." In particular, Story is taken as the type of those precursors who have made Europe easier for later generations of Americans. The old relation, social, personal, æsthetic, of the American to Europe is to Mr. James's view as charming a subject as the student of manners, morals, personal adventures, the history of taste, the development of a society, need wish to take up; and one, moreover, that never has been "done." And so,

he explains, a boxful of old papers, personal records and relics, all relating to the Storys, having been placed in his hands, "in default of projecting more or less poetically such an experience as I have glanced at-the American initiation in a comparative historic twilight-I avail myself of an existing instance, and gladly make the most of it." The entertainment, he has to admit, is particularly subjective. The biography, in consequence, opens out and flowers, as it were, in autobiography of the biographer. To Mr. James's wistful eyes the lot of these pioneers fell upon golden days, on the vision of which his fancy dwells with a playful tenderness. So that in these volumes his business is not only with Story's "case" and with those of his

friends; but taking a further subtle step, he occupies himself-fancifully, ironically, shyly, under our enjoying eyes with his own peculiar "case" as the custodian of this boxful of ghosts whom it is his pious duty to evoke! First of these delightful evocations comes that of the New England life amidst which William Story was brought up. It was represented for him by his father, a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States and a lawyer of world-wide repute, and in no way, says his biographer, could it have been better expressed than in the character and career of that distinguished man. "All the light, surely, that the Puritan tradition had to give, it gave, with free hands, in Judge Story-culture, courtesy, liberality, humanity, at their best, the last finish of the type and its full flower." He never visited England, though once towards the end of his life he was so near sailing that the invitations were "out" on this side to the most luminous lights of the law to meet him at the tables of Lord Denman and Lord Brougham. Mr. James, as may be imagined, catches for purposes of contrast the simpler conditions of lifethe homeliness of the ways and the admirable manners-of this "lovable great man"; who, as he says, wore this character on the very basis of his world, as it stood, without borrowing a ray, directly, from any other; yet of whom it was told that, to the surprise of an English traveller one evening at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was able promptly to "place" some small street in London of which the name had come up in talk, but of which the traveller was ignorant. Judge Story, in other words, knew his London because, even at that then prodigious distance from it, he had a feeling for it. Story's mother was the daughter of another American judge, and the granddaughter of General Waldo who commanded

at the siege of Louisburg, and on its fall was rewarded with the grant of a whole county in Maine. Young Story was ten years of age when his parents left Salem, where he was born, and went to Cambridge (near Boston), Lowell's birthplace. Salem, and its judge, "by his type and above all by what we have called his amenity," remind Mr. James of something once said to him by an accomplished French critic,

who, much versed in the writings of Englishmen and Americans, had been dilating with emphasis and with surprise upon the fine manner of Hawthorne, whose distinction was so great, whose taste, without anything to account for it, was so juste. "Il sortait de Boston, de Salem, de je ne sais quel trou"-and yet there he was, full-blown and finished. So it was, my friend surely would have said, with the elder Story. He came, practically, out of the same hole as Hawthorne, and might to the alien mind have been as great a surprise.

Young Story entered Harvard, of course, and perhaps to appreciate the proper quality of the biographer's references to his college life one must have known something of it in detail from other sources, which are not wanting. Out of it at any rate sprang Story's marriage at twenty-three with Miss Emelyn Eldredge, the happiest of unions, and friendships that were to be lifelong with, among others, Charles Sumner and J. R. Lowell, whose young wife also belonged to the sunny circle of these Arcadian days, the vision of which he himself has fixed in his "Fireside Travels." Our volumes contain many letters from both men, Sumner's always "going a little large" we may think, but full of the writer's personality, and Lowell's gay, sincere, heart-warming, as all things about Lowell seem to be, and of course inveterately punning. Nine years after graduating at Harvard were occupied

[ocr errors]

in the study and practice of Law by day and all the Arts by night. The Story of the many-editioned "Story on Contracts" was the same Story who sang, danced, made verses, mimicked, painted and modelled, causing the elder folk of Cambridge and Boston to shake their heads over his irresponsibility, and even Lowell to laugh at him (as we have read somewhere) for wishing to be an Admirable Crichton. So that he was thirty, married, and successfully entered upon a legal career before, changing the plan of his life, he settled in Rome, fairly launched on his "long marmorean adventure," as Mr. Henry James calls it.

To continue following the biographic outline, the first stage of that adventure was one of discouragement in his work, which ended with the enthusiastic recognition and purchase for large prices of the Cleopatra and the Libyan Sibyl, already referred to, in the 1862 Exhibition. But these years anchored him in Italy, in spite of one or two attempts to slip away. The correspondence and diaries belonging to them show the rapid widening of interests and friendships that bound the Storys to it. In Florence, a month or two only after sailing from Boston, they met Mr. and Mrs. Browning, who were soon to find and move into Casa Guidi, and there sprang up immediately a warm and intimate attachment between the two households, as one had learned already from Mrs. Browning's published letters. In one of these to Mrs. Jameson, it may be remembered, occurs a touching reference to the death of Story's six-year-old boy, the ache of which loss never was quite removed for the father. The verses entitled "The Sad Country," among his later lyrics, are evidently, as his biographer notes, "the persistent echo, after years, of the least endurable of the writer's bereavements." When the boy took ill his sister was sent over to the

Brownings' house, and there she also was struck down, and for a while lay at death's door. It was this little maid, in her convalescence, whom Thackeray, seated on the edge of her bed, between daylight and dusk, amused by reading, chapter by chapter, his as yet unpublished "The Rose and the Ring." And to the same occasion partly refer the following touching recollections of another visitor:

Hans Andersen, whose private interest in children and whose ability to charm them were not less marked than his public, knew well his way to the house, as later to Palazzo Barberini (to the neighborhood of which the "Improvisatore" was able even to add a charm); where the small people with whom he played enjoyed, under his spell, the luxury of believing that he kept and treasured-in every case and as a rule the old tin soldiers and broken toys received by him, in acknowledgment of favors, from impulsive infant hands. Beautiful the queer image of the great benefactor moving about Europe with his accumulations of these relics. Wonderful too echo of a certain occasion-that of a children's party, later on-when, after he had read out to his young friends "The Ugly Duckling," Browning struck up with "The Pied Piper"; which led to the formation of a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.

our

[blocks in formation]
« AnteriorContinuar »