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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Homer Martin, by Elizabeth Gilbert Martin
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Homer Martin
-       A Reminiscence
-
-Author: Elizabeth Gilbert Martin
-
-Release Date: September 6, 2017 [EBook #55498]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOMER MARTIN ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
-http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
-generously made available by The Internet Archive)
-
-
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-HOMER MARTIN
-
-A REMINISCENCE
-
-[Illustration: HOMER MARTIN
-
-From a photograph taken in England in 1892]
-
-
-
-
-    HOMER MARTIN
-
-    A REMINISCENCE
-
-    [Illustration]
-
-    OCTOBER 28, 1836—FEBRUARY 12, 1897
-
-    NEW YORK
-    WILLIAM MACBETH
-    1904
-
-    Copyright, 1904, by WILLIAM MACBETH
-
-    [Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-ILLUSTRATIONS
-
-
-    PORTRAIT OF HOMER MARTIN         _Frontispiece_
-
-                                       FACING PAGE
-
-    NORMANDY TREES                               6
-
-    THE DUNES                                   12
-
-    ON THE HUDSON                               18
-
-    BLOSSOMING TREES                            24
-
-    THE HAUNTED HOUSE                           28
-
-    THE CRIQUEBŒUF CHURCH                       32
-
-    GOLDEN SANDS                                36
-
-    ON THE SEINE (“HARP OF THE WINDS”)          40
-
-    TREES NEAR VILLERVILLE                      46
-
-    CAPE TRINITY                                52
-
-    A NEWPORT LANDSCAPE                         56
-
-The publisher cordially thanks the friends who kindly lent the pictures
-which have been reproduced to illustrate these pages.
-
-
-
-
-INTRODUCTION
-
-
-During the last year I have more than once been told that an
-authoritative biographical sketch of my husband ought to be written
-and I have never felt inclined to dispute the statement as an abstract
-proposition. But when it is followed by the direct question: “Who so
-capable of writing it as you?” the names of one or two of his personal
-friends inevitably present themselves as belonging to practised writers
-and connoisseurs of art, who might, perhaps, need the aid of dates or
-facts I could supply, but who, in more essential respects, would be
-altogether better equipped for the task. Homer Martin was so intensely
-masculine, so preëminently a man’s man, that he must necessarily have
-escaped thorough comprehension by any woman. And this, I think, is the
-chief reason why I have so long delayed, why I am even now inclined to
-shirk altogether, the fulfilment of my reluctant promise to put on paper
-some of my memories of the years we spent together.
-
-The question made me smile when it was propounded more than a year ago,
-but since then it has often made me ponder. Doubtless no one else has had
-so long and intimate an acquaintance with various phases of his character
-and circumstances; doubtless, too, it was not merely as an artist that
-he commanded attention and attracted life-long friends. Yet I suppose
-it must be solely in this character that he appeals to the majority of
-those who are now attaining to a tardy appreciation of his achievement
-as a whole. It is not in my power to hasten that. When I first met him
-my ignorance of art—at any rate on its pictorial side—was dense; and
-if it has been somewhat mitigated since, that result is due solely to
-him and largely to his own works. Is not this tantamount to expressing
-my conviction that those who wish to increase their knowledge of Homer
-Martin as an artist can do so much more satisfactorily by studying the
-landscapes into which he has put as much of his best self as any man
-could part with and live, than by reading anything I find it possible to
-say about him? Aspects of external nature are inextricably blended in
-these with the mind, moods, and personality of the painter. Years before
-he had quite succeeded in mastering his material, I remember the late
-John Richard Dennett saying of them: “Martin’s landscapes look as if no
-one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is an austerity,
-a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful
-of them, which were also in him, and an instinctive perception of which
-had made me say to him in the very earliest days of our acquaintance that
-he reminded me of Ishmael. They formed, I think, the substratum of his
-personality. Needless to add, for those who knew him even slightly, that
-he had other phases. Though the human verb in him was one and singular,
-its moods were many.
-
-                                                ELIZABETH GILBERT MARTIN.
-
-
-
-
-A REMINISCENCE
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-A REMINISCENCE
-
-
-Homer Dodge Martin, fourth child and youngest son of Homer Martin and
-Sarah Dodge, was born in Albany, N. Y., in a house on Park Street,
-October 28, 1836. That was my own native city, but although we must
-have lived for years in the same neighborhood, he was past twenty-two
-and I in my twenty-first year when we first became acquainted. But for
-the anti-slavery movement which split the Methodist body first into two
-great sections and then into minor subdivisions, we might have met much
-earlier, for, in our childhood, our parents had attended the same place
-of worship.
-
-What I know, therefore, about his early years I learned chiefly from
-his mother. He was not of a reminiscent habit as a rule, and his
-recollections of childhood were not always pleasant. His father was
-one of the most upright and altogether the mildest-tempered of all the
-men that I have met. His mother was a woman of strong but uncultivated
-mind, keen wit, incisive speech and arbitrary will, from whom her son
-derived many of his own characteristics, including his innate bent toward
-pictorial expression. In her that inclination never took any but the
-crudest shape, but she had beyond all peradventure the instinct which
-under more propitious circumstances would have displayed itself more
-convincingly. Perhaps the very cramping of it in her was the cause of its
-appearance at so preternaturally early an age in him. She more than once
-told me that he began to draw as soon as he could hold a pencil, and that
-from his twentieth month to provide him with one and a piece of blank
-paper was the surest means of quieting his most turbulent outbreaks.
-Years afterward, not long before our marriage, his first schoolmistress
-sent me a spirited drawing of a horse which she said he had made for her
-when not more than five years old.
-
-This drawing was produced in one of the Albany ward schools, and it
-pretty accurately foreshadowed all that he was to accomplish in them
-thereafter. I doubt if he ever took kindly to lessons obviously given.
-Even in painting, his sole direct tuition was imparted by James Hart
-and extended over two weeks only. What he needed, what suited him, he
-then and always took in, so to say, through his pores, absorbing what
-he required, leaving other things untouched, and wrestling unaided with
-his personal problems. Greatly to his own after regret, his ordinary
-schooling ended when he was thirteen. But at the time his aversion
-to school-books and school routine dovetailed to a marvel with the
-persuasion of his relatives that it was time for him to begin earning his
-own livelihood. He once told me that his school-hours had been largely
-spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush hills on the other
-side of the Hudson, and in longing for the time to come when he could go
-over there in the horse-boat with paper and pencil to record a nearer
-view.
-
-Nevertheless, it was only for school-books as such that he had an
-intimate aversion. In other lines all was fish that came to his net. How
-he obtained it I do not know, but a copy of Volney’s “Ruins” which he
-read at this period colored his opinions in a way that he afterward found
-reason to regret. But at the time it made him an irreverent, amused, and
-precocious critic of the talk he heard at Conference-time, when itinerant
-ministers thronged the family board.
-
-[Illustration: NORMANDY TREES
-
-Reproduced from the original painting in the Wilstach Collection,
-Philadelphia]
-
-Poetry of certain kinds attracted him throughout his life, and verse that
-greatly pleased him would stamp itself indelibly on his memory. Once in
-a great while, almost to the last, I could persuade him to repeat to
-me Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with a lingering enunciation and a
-melancholy charm of accent which a few of his most intimate friends may
-likewise recall. I especially remember one night in Villerville, when
-we were alone out-of-doors in the late moonlight, awaiting in vain the
-advent of a nightingale said to have been heard in the neighborhood, that
-he more than compensated me for its absence by reciting the whole of the
-same poet’s lines to that “light-wingèd Dryad of the trees.” Reciting,
-I say, but the word is ill chosen. It was rather a barely audible
-yet perfectly distinct breathing out of the ineffable melancholy and
-remoteness of those perfect lines.
-
-Homer was transferred to his father’s carpenter shop on leaving school;
-but even that most patient of men came at last to the reluctant
-conclusion that the long, slender fingers which could not refrain from
-ornamenting smoothly planed boards with irrelevant trees and mountains
-were of no use at all in handling saws and chisels. A shopkeeper with
-whom he was next placed as clerk, much against the boy’s own will,
-soon discharged him for incorrigible—perhaps premeditated—rudeness to
-customers. One of these, who was a young cleric in the Episcopalian
-Seminary in Ninth Avenue, New York City, when he told me the story,
-described in words too graphic to quote, the manner in which, as a child,
-he had once been driven out of the shop and all memory of what he was
-sent for out of his mind, by the thunderous scowl and wrath-freighted
-tone and terms in which Homer inquired what he wanted.
-
-He was next introduced into the architect’s office of a relative, whence
-he was eliminated, partly because his cousin thought the inevitable
-landscapes that decorated his plans totally superfluous, but also on
-account of Homer’s congenital inability to see perpendicular lines
-distinctly. I think I never saw him draw an upright of any sort without
-first laying his paper or canvas on its side. When the Civil War broke
-out, shortly before our marriage, and he presented himself for the draft,
-it was this defect of vision which caused the examiners to reject him.
-
-Every attempt at harnessing him to a beaten track of obvious utility and
-present productiveness having terminated disastrously, from the paternal
-point of view, E. D. Palmer, the Albany sculptor, finally succeeded in
-persuading the elder Homer Martin that his son’s talent and inclination
-for art were too marked and exclusive to permit of his success in any
-other pursuit. Thenceforward—he was perhaps sixteen—he was left free to
-follow the bent of his genius. I do not know where he painted at first;
-perhaps at home. Later on, he had a studio in the old Museum Building,
-at the junction of State Street and Broadway. James Hart had previously
-occupied it, and it was probably there that for a fortnight he acted as
-Homer’s instructor.
-
-There were other painters in Albany at the time: William Hart, George
-Boughton, Edward Gay, perhaps one or two others, with all of whom he was
-intimate and whose studios he frequented. Boughton went abroad not long
-after, and, when he was in France, once wrote to Launt Thompson in most
-enthusiastic terms concerning the landscapes of Corot, whose great vogue
-had hardly yet begun, but with whose work Boughton was at once enchanted.
-And, in describing it, he remarked that “if Homer Martin had been his
-pupil he could hardly paint more like him.” It was not until long years
-after that Thompson had the grace to repeat the observation to Homer, and
-when at last he did so, the only reply he got was: “Why did you not tell
-me that years ago, when it would have been of some service to me?” For
-Homer, too, was one of the Corot worshipers from the first.
-
-It was in the Museum studio that I first saw Homer Martin. It was not
-until long afterward that I learned—and not from him—that having seen
-me in the street, he deliberately sought acquaintance with my eldest
-brother, like himself a lover of music and a frequenter of the local
-Philharmonic Society. An invitation to visit the studio and bring his
-sisters soon followed. To the end of his days, I suppose, Homer had
-reticences of that sort with me. At the time I speak of he was already
-locally known as a colorist of no mean capacity and a man of genius. I
-had heard his name, but only in connection with that of a dear friend and
-schoolmate of my own, a beautiful, golden-haired little creature, with
-a voice as delightful as her person, whom he was said to be following
-everywhere she went. They never met until after our marriage, which
-preceded her own.
-
-I went one afternoon with my brother to see his pictures and his studio.
-The latter struck me as the most untidy room I had ever entered. I
-remember his rushing to throw things behind a large screen. I was not
-used to paintings. Such as I had seen had seemed to me mere daubs to
-which any good engraving would be altogether preferable. But on that
-afternoon there was a large unfinished landscape on the easel, which
-even to my unpractised eye conveyed the promise of beauty. It was a
-commission, painted for a Mr. Thomas of Albany, if I do not mistake.
-There were two great boulders lifting their heads out of a shallow
-foreground brook, and one day, much later, when I was there, he painted
-his own initials on one of them and mine on the other, but—as was always
-his habit when he remembered to sign his pictures at all—in tints
-differing so slightly from that of the surface on which he inscribed
-them as to be scarcely distinguishable from it.
-
-[Illustration: THE DUNES
-
-Reproduced from the original water color in the collection of Mr. Wm.
-Macbeth]
-
-We were married in my father’s house during the first year of the Civil
-War, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1861, and went off the same day to
-Twin Lakes, Connecticut. I still have the first sketch in oils which he
-made out-of-doors that season: a barley-field, meadow land in the middle
-distance, gray-green trees beyond. Two or three brown boulders, others
-merely penciled in, lie on the left of the foreground. The delicate heads
-of grain are swaying in a light breeze. Perhaps he did not do much in
-the way of visible work that summer. At all events, I do not now recall
-any. But in some subsequent winter he embodied his recollections of the
-place and time in a delightful landscape. All his life long, I think, his
-results were arrived at more by means of a slow, only half deliberate
-absorption when out-of-doors than by a wilful effort to record them at
-the time. Yet the one exception to that statement which I distinctly
-recall is a very great one: the Westchester Hills, which is thought by
-many to be his most perfect landscape. It was painted entirely _en plein
-air_, and many a day I sat close by, reading aloud or knitting while it
-was in progress. He never got so much as an offer for it, nor was it
-until more than two years after his death that a purchaser was found
-sufficiently venturesome to end a long hesitation by paying $1,000 to
-obtain it. He was presently rewarded for his temerity, I am happy to
-say, for when he put it up at auction a few months later, it brought him
-$4,750. The second purchaser was still more fortunate, reselling it for
-$5,300.
-
-Neither of us ever revisited Twin Lakes. Later in the season we went to
-the farmhouse of Mr. Thaddeus Dewey, near Fort Ann, N. Y., where we
-remained until late in the autumn.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-My husband retained his Albany studio until the winter of 1862-63, when
-he went to New York and for some months painted in the studio of Mr.
-James Smillie. It could hardly have been earlier than the winter of
-1864-65 that after many efforts he succeeded in finding an empty studio
-in the Tenth Street Studio Building—a little, skylighted room on the
-top corridor which he occupied continuously until he resigned it before
-sailing for England the second time in the fall of 1881. His forty-fifth
-birthday came while he was on shipboard. I followed him to London in the
-succeeding June.
-
-His nearest neighbors in the Studio Building for many years were Sanford
-R. Gifford, Richard Hubbard, C. C. Griswold, and J. G. Brown. Jervis
-McEntee and his charming wife were on the corridor next below; so was
-Julian Scott. Eastman Johnson and Launt Thompson were on the ground
-floor. I think that John La Farge must have come a little later. At any
-rate, I do not remember him before the winter of 1867-68. Failing, as
-often happened, to find my husband in his own studio, I went one day to
-that of Mr. La Farge on the same corridor in search of him. He was not
-there either, but I still retain a very distinct recollection of Mr. La
-Farge, face and characteristic attitude of doubtful welcome for intruders
-quickly changing as he divined my identity, asked me to enter, and so
-began a friendship still unbroken. Of course, Homer had talked a good
-deal to me about him. Certain questions which had been pressing on my
-mind with increasing persistence ever since my father’s death in 1866,
-very speedily found expression in a sort of personal catechism concerning
-his hereditary faith which he, perhaps, may likewise recall.
-
-We were fairly prosperous in those early years, or might have been if we
-had been constituted differently. “There is much virtue in If.” Homer’s
-landscapes were often commissioned, and seldom remained long on his
-easel in any case after they were finished. But it was never possible
-to count on any definite term as that of their probable completion. He
-was a man of many moods, and that one of them in which he could paint
-and be satisfied after a fashion with what he painted, was the most
-irregular and uncertain of them all. He did not possess his genius but
-was possessed by it. His fallow periods were many. When they passed away,
-the first sign that seeds had begun to sprout again was often the entire
-scraping out of a landscape that to others had seemed to need only the
-final touches. I asked him once in later years, at a time when there was
-every need for exertion were it possible, why he did not paint. It was in
-1881. “I cannot paint,” said he. “I do not know where the impulse comes
-from, nor why it stays away. All I know is that when it comes I can do
-nothing else but paint; when it goes I can do nothing but dawdle.” That
-was absolutely true. It was also very inconvenient.
-
-But in that earlier period with which I am still concerned, his pictures
-for years brought him an income which averaged between two and three
-thousand dollars, sometimes more than that. It was war-time and after.
-Prices were high for everything. Money came at irregular intervals, often
-so prolonged that, when it did come, it had to be chiefly employed in
-the process he once described as “mopping up debts;” a kind of industry
-to which he found me persistently addicted. Neither of us took as much
-thought for the morrow as perhaps we might have done had not the morrows
-themselves seemed so uncertain a quantity. Life used to present itself
-to me at that time as a narrow path leading between precipices, across
-turbulent brooks, over stones that were slippery as well as sharp, and
-whose end was nowhere in sight. In fact, it never did become visible
-until, turning at some unexpected angle, our cul-de-sac would prove to
-have had a hidden outlet after all. Perhaps this was why our frequently
-recurring difficulties troubled us more and taught us less than they
-might have done under different circumstances. In the complex of life we
-ourselves were circumstances. Once, in later years, he casually remarked
-that I had never given him a chance to get tired of me, because he never
-knew what I would do next. Can any one give what one has not got?
-
-[Illustration: ON THE HUDSON
-
-Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of John M.
-Robertson, Esq.]
-
-Meantime, we found life entertaining as well as perplexing and difficult.
-Our little boys were healthy, intelligent and good-tempered. Homer’s
-work, when he could once settle down to it, was always able to divert
-his mind from every other preoccupation. I had been writing book reviews
-occasionally ever since the early spring of 1861 for the “Leader,” to
-which paper an article of mine concerning Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis’s
-first novel had been sent under a pseudonym by the brother I have
-already referred to, who was a friend of that eccentric genius, Henry
-Clapp. Later on, I wrote once in a while for the “Round Table,” and,
-after some date in 1866, when Auerbach’s “On the Heights” was sent me
-from the “Nation” editorial rooms for review, pretty steadily for that
-periodical. Our friends were interesting to both of us. If Homer ever
-“talked shop,” at least I never heard him, and the men whose company
-he instinctively sought were never painters; or, since I must make an
-exception in the case of John La Farge, they were never merely that. He
-had a great capacity for love, and the two men whom he loved best were
-critics in the large sense: John Richard Dennett, from the first time
-they met until his untimely death in 1874; and William C. Brownell from
-that period, or perhaps before it, until the end.
-
-Painting was his own sole means of adequate expression. Perhaps I ought
-not to say that. I may not be an adequate judge, and certainly I have
-heard great things about his reputation as a talker at the Century
-Club. But to me, from first to last, he never talked about impersonal
-subjects—perhaps because he could not consider anything that affected
-me in a purely impersonal light. I always read aloud to him a great
-deal, but the books and topics which interested me most after 1870
-never interested him at all. Until then we had both been turning our
-intellectual searchlights in every conceivable intellectual direction. At
-that period mine steadied on its proper centre and veered no more. But to
-the very end I continued to read to him whatever he desired to hear.
-
-Nevertheless, even though he was too many-sided not to find issue in more
-than one direction, his pictures are the only permanent result of his
-imperative need for self-expression. He always detested what he called
-literary pictures—pictures, that is, that told or tried to tell a story.
-And yet I think it true to say that if he is supreme as a colorist it is
-largely because color was to him an instrument, not an end. He used it
-as a poet uses words. He made it reflect not so much what is obvious in
-nature as that duplex image into which external nature fused itself with
-him, who was also a part of nature. To me, this is what individualizes
-his pictures. I think it impossible to mistake them. When he was in
-England the second time, I went to the art rooms of Mr. Lanthier, whom
-I had authorized to obtain from William Schaus a landscape I had never
-seen, and which had been for some months tucked away in an upper room
-inaccessible to visitors. I, at least, had been refused a sight of it
-when I went to the Schaus gallery for that purpose. The attendant told
-me they did not exhibit American pictures. Lanthier obtained possession
-of it, and when I saw it I remarked that, as usual, it was unsigned.
-“Unsigned!” protested he. “It is signed from the top of the canvas to the
-bottom. No one in the world could have painted it but Homer Martin.” He
-sold it a few days later to Mr. Sidney de Kay, whose family, I believe,
-still possesses it.
-
-Homer went abroad for the first time in 1876, in company with the late
-Dr. Jacob S. Mosher, an Albany friend of both of us since before our
-marriage, and at that period quarantine physician of the port of New
-York. They went to France and Holland, perhaps to Belgium, as well as
-to England. How far they penetrated into France I do not remember, but
-I do recall—though when Mr. Charles de Kay wrote to ask the question
-some three years since I had forgotten—that they visited Barbizon and
-probably some of the painters whose classic ground it was, and that
-Homer made some pencilings both there and at Saint-Cloud. They were
-absent for some considerable time, and it was at this period that he made
-acquaintance with the late James McNeill Whistler.
-
-He sailed for England the second time in October, 1881, and I joined him
-in London early in the next July. On the “glorious Fourth” we visited
-Mr. Whistler’s studio, where Homer had occasionally painted. I think it
-must have been there that he painted, late in the previous autumn, a
-delightful Newport landscape which was bought at the Artist Fund sale of
-that season by Mr. Lanthier for Mr. Charles de Kay. Whistler’s beautiful
-portrait of his mother—which I afterward saw in Paris at the Salon—was
-on the easel, and it is the only one of his pictures which I distinctly
-recollect. There were some “nocturnes” on the walls, and they were
-doubtless worth remembering. But I never went there again, and on this
-occasion my attention was riveted by the artist and his surroundings,
-alike spectacular and bizarre, the man grotesque as a caricature in
-attitude and aspect, the rooms all pale blue and lemon-yellow, even
-to the many vases and the flowers therein contained. He said a good
-many things, not one of which was I able to recall, so lost was I in
-contemplation of the general oddity of him and his chosen environment.
-“What did you think of him?” asked Homer after we came away. “Why didn’t
-you talk? You never said a thing.” “I was afraid to open my lips,” said
-I, “lest I should involuntarily tell him to shake that feather out of
-his hair. He must have had his head buried in a pillow before we went
-in.” “I wish you had!” said he with a laugh. “That is Jimmy’s feather. He
-delights in having it noticed.” I had observed that he bowed profoundly
-on our introduction and so brought it into staring evidence; but I could
-scarcely believe, even on testimony, that the premeditated effect was
-produced by a quite unpremeditated lock of gray hair.
-
-[Illustration: BLOSSOMING TREES
-
-Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Mrs.
-Charles O. Gates]
-
-The especial occasion for this second visit to England was the making
-of some drawings illustrative of places mentioned in the novels of
-Thackeray and George Eliot. He had been there for some months and they
-were hardly more than begun, but after I came he worked at them pretty
-steadily. It was an undertaking which he did not at all enjoy, but which
-circumstances had made imperative. When he first told me of it in the
-previous summer, he made it evident that he thought such a commission
-derogatory to his dignity as a painter. Whether it was that his pictures
-were selling less readily, or because the painting mood came with less
-imperative frequency, I do not know, but he was unusually despondent. The
-idea of the voyage was pleasant in itself. One of his never fulfilled
-longings was to cross the ocean in a sailing vessel. His Artist Fund
-picture was nearly due and could be painted on the other side; he thought
-the price of the drawings would pay all his other expenses. And when an
-unexpected stroke of good fortune made it possible for me to join him,
-his sky cleared up. I do not remember whether the English drawings were
-successful; I do know that they were tardy in reaching the New York
-office of The Century Company, for whose magazine they had been destined,
-and that when, in the ensuing year, he sent the same publishers a set of
-Villerville drawings, accompanied by a sketch he had suggested my writing
-about that delightful haunt of painters, Mr. Gilder wrote me, after some
-delay, that they had been much interested in my article, but that their
-art department was not satisfied with the drawings. It was subsequently
-published in the “Catholic World,” unaccompanied by the illustrations,
-that magazine not then having begun to produce any.
-
-In October of that year, the completion of the last drawing coincided
-with the arrival in London of an old New York friend, the late Mr. Bryant
-Godwin, and an invitation to spend some weeks in Normandy with the family
-of another, W. J. Hennessy, the well-known artist and illustrator. There
-was no further reason for delay in England, and the three of us crossed
-the Channel one night by the Southampton boat. I have never forgotten
-my first sight of the French shore next morning. “I don’t wonder now at
-Rousseau’s color,” I said to Homer; “how could he help it?”
-
-It had been our intention to return to New York after a brief visit
-with the Hennessys, who had been living for years in a picturesque and
-pleasant way at Pennedepie, an agricultural hamlet on the road between
-Honfleur and Trouville, where they occupied a roomy and quaintly
-furnished old manor just opposite the village church. But we found the
-place, the people, and the neighboring views alike delightful, and when
-news arrived, early in our stay, of a considerable sum to his credit
-which had been lying for some months uncalled for at the American
-Exchange, London, where it had been sent to his first address by Mr.
-James Stillman, Homer decided on remaining in Normandy. To have returned
-to New York just then would have been a distinct loss to both of us in
-many ways. I look back on the time we spent in Villerville as the most
-tranquil and satisfactory period of our life together.
-
-That little fishing village, dominated by the tower of a church erected
-when the eleventh century was young, in thanksgiving because the
-foreboded end of the world had not come in the year 1000, lies about
-midway between Honfleur and Trouville, at an easy walk from Pennedepie.
-Equidistant from either place stands the ivy-grown church of Criquebœuf,
-beloved of artists, and made by Homer the theme of one of his best
-pictures. In the same grassy enclosure on the right of the pond into
-which this old church dips its foot, he found two more delightful
-subjects. One of them is embodied on one of his last canvases, the
-“Normandy Farm,” now owned, I believe, by Mr. Bloomingdale of New York.
-It was bought in the first place by Mr. W. T. Evans, a week or so before
-my husband’s death. The other, a view of a deserted manor, showing dimly
-through a veil of ghostly trees, which Mrs. Hennessy declared ought to be
-called “The Haunted House,” was finished in New York after his return for
-an early friend, Dr. D. M. Stimson, to whom for many years he had been
-greatly attached. I think it was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair.
-
-[Illustration: THE HAUNTED HOUSE
-
-Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Dr. D. M.
-Stimson]
-
-Villerville had for years been thronged in summer and fall by painters,
-French, English, and American; perhaps it is so still. Guillemet had been
-there for twenty consecutive seasons; Duez had built himself a house and
-studio with a Norman tower. Stanley Reinhart came both summers while we
-were there, with that most sweet wife of his and their pretty little
-children. The Forbes-Robertsons had a little villa for a while,—the
-parents, that is, and Miss Frances, then a girl of sixteen; and the
-actor son must have spent some considerable part of his vacation with
-them, for I recall a rather animated discussion we had one night, pacing
-up and down the _estacade_ in the moonlight, when he declaimed in so
-ardent a fashion about the intrinsic and extrinsic glories of England,
-that a mere sense of equilibrium made the interjection of a “What about
-Ireland? What about India?” seem to me inevitable. “Oh! unjust, if you
-insist,” said he. “But I am an Englishman—Scotch as a matter of fact,
-I suppose. And you must admit that a man is bound to stand up for his
-country, right or wrong.” It is a sentiment I have never been able to
-understand. Some of us, I suppose, are born cosmopolitans, or else look
-forward to “an abiding city wherein dwelleth justice,” since not even
-patriotism can insist that it has a local abiding place here.
-
-And that reminds me of another incident belonging to the winter
-time, when, as there was not an English-speaking soul in the entire
-neighborhood except ourselves, our landlord one day brought me in
-despair a lady whose vernacular it was, accompanied by a French _bonne_
-and two little children as apple-faced and ruddy as Polly Toodles’
-babies. She explained that she was the wife of a major in the English
-army, and had but just returned with him from India; also, that while
-there she had read such a glowing description of the beauties of
-Villerville in a copy of “The Queen,” that she had determined to examine
-them for herself. I did what I could for her in the way of finding a
-furnished apartment, and before they had removed to it, went one morning
-to return her call at one of the hotels. I found her and the major at
-a late breakfast, with the English newspapers lying about. The period
-antedated Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s change of his political coat, the
-Irish question was well to the front, and my new acquaintances spoke
-English with one of the most sonorous brogues that had ever greeted my
-ear. Here was a case in which my own sympathies and the presumable ones
-of my audience seemed naturally to invite a moderate expression of views
-on a current topic. Dead silence fell for a moment after I had stopped
-speaking. Then the major said with an accent that positively projected:
-“Excuse me, but I am English: that is to say, I am Irish, _but of the
-landlord class_!” It was simply a matter of the point of view.
-
-It was this question of the seasons, I think, which chiefly necessitated
-my learning the language which was afterward of so much use to both of us
-up to the very end. It also necessitated a more incessant companionship
-than at any period was ever possible in the city of the Century Club. It
-was easy to pick up French enough to carry on such intercourse as was
-absolutely necessary with the people about us, but my serious study of
-it was undertaken in the first place in order that I might continue to
-read aloud to Homer in the evenings after the available supply of English
-novels and periodicals had been exhausted. I began with About’s “Roi
-des Montagnes,” my method being to read a sentence to accustom his ear
-and my tongue to the unfamiliar sounds, and forthwith to translate it
-literally. Of course, I had teachers, one of whom had taught this, her
-native language, in a London private school, while a second was at the
-time professor of English in the College of Honfleur. Curious English it
-must have been! But he was praiseworthily anxious to increase his own
-knowledge as well as mine. But the best one of the three was a delightful
-woman, Mademoiselle Lemonnier, the village postmistress, who did not know
-a word of English although her mother had been an Englishwoman. She was
-very well read and intelligent as well as companionable and kindly. I had
-applied to her, when my first instructress found it impossible to come
-any longer, to find me another. We already knew each other pretty well,
-and when she said, “If you will let me teach you _for love_, I will do it
-myself, but if you insist on paying, I will inquire for some one else,”
-it was simply a new version of Hobson’s choice. I could not have done
-better in any case. When Homer went abroad for the last time, he made a
-point of crossing the Channel to visit Mademoiselle Lemonnier. Slender
-as were their means of communication, they had managed to understand and
-sympathize with each other very completely, a strong sense of humor on
-either side helping greatly to that consummation.
-
-[Illustration: THE CRIQUEBŒUF CHURCH
-
-Reproduced from the original drawing through the courtesy of Dr. D. M.
-Stimson]
-
-We lived in Villerville for nineteen months. An excellent studio with
-two adjacent rooms had been arranged for us before our arrival, and we
-lunched and dined at Madame Cornu’s hotel, providing our breakfast in our
-own quarters. A quaint old English priest whom I knew in London, and who
-had to the full the hereditary prejudice against “Johnny Crapaud,” had
-warned me not merely of what he believed to be the prevalent Jansenism
-which would prevent so frequent an approach to the sacraments as I had
-been accustomed to, but against the cheating, the conscienceless thievery
-to which he assured me we would be subjected on all sides. “I would not
-spend a farthing in France!” said he. Well, in Paris, perhaps, though
-I had no personal experience of it even there. But in Villerville, and
-afterward in Honfleur, there was absolutely no exception to the perfect
-cordiality, absolute trust, and gentle politeness which greeted us on all
-sides. I have never met anything like it elsewhere save in the parish
-of the Paulist Fathers in New York. I speak from what may be called
-exhaustive knowledge, since there was a period, before we left the former
-place, when we were out of money for so long that when at last we were
-able to settle Madame Cornu’s bill it amounted to the considerable sum
-of two thousand francs. I had asked her some time previously if she
-were not in need of it, but only to receive the smiling answer: “When
-Madame pleases. We are neither of us robbers.” So in Honfleur, where,
-after we had been domiciled for a month or so, and had found our fresh
-bread and rolls on the kitchen-window ledge every morning, I went to the
-baker to inquire for and settle his account. “But, Madame,” objected
-the fresh-cheeked young woman in charge, “we have kept no account. Does
-not Madame know how much it is herself?” “Why, yes,” said I; “you have
-brought so much for so many days at such a price.” “_C’est ça_” she
-smiled. “Whatever Madame says.” And this, again, reminds me of Madame
-Cornu and her remarkable bill. There had been a price set in the first
-place of so much a day for our two meals, which were always abundant and
-well-cooked. I knew the dates and was ready with the exact sum. But when
-my tally was placed beside her bill there was a discrepancy arising from
-the fact that Homer would sometimes be absent from the midday meal by
-reason of a sketching excursion or something of the sort, and she was
-never notified beforehand. Yet on every such occasion a deduction had
-been scrupulously made. Such an experience never befell us elsewhere.
-
-To Homer also Villerville was as delightful as any place could be while
-lacking that social intercourse with men of brains and cultivation
-which was always his chief pleasure and relaxation. Years afterward,
-Mr. Brownell said one evening when we were all dining together in those
-pleasant apartments of theirs on Fifty-sixth Street, that the three weeks
-which he and his wife had spent there with us seemed to him more like his
-idea of heaven than anything he remembered. And he asked me whether I
-would not like to live it all over again. In retrospect, yes; as I have
-just been proving. But, were it possible in reality? O no! Never have I
-seen a day that has tempted me to say to it: “Stay, thou art fair!”
-
-[Illustration: GOLDEN SANDS
-
-Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Mrs. Wm.
-Macbeth]
-
-Our sojourn in Villerville was a particularly important one for both of
-us, but in different ways. For him it was a period of absorption rather
-than of production, while, on that very account, exactly the reverse
-process went on in me. I have already said it was at his suggestion
-that I accompanied his Villerville drawings with an article which, Mr.
-Brownell afterward wrote me, was like “a Martin landscape put into
-words.” Homer perhaps thought so himself, for he had already said: “I see
-that you can paint with words. I wonder if you can set people in action.
-Why not try?” Whereupon I made a character sketch which Mr. Alden, of
-“Harper’s Magazine,” declined because “it was too painful,” but which
-the then editor of “Lippincott’s”—I think his name was Kirk—found too
-short, and wrote me that if I would lengthen it out so that it should
-bear less resemblance to a truncated cone, he would be glad to avail
-himself of it. Whereupon I recalled it, fished up my heroine out of an
-earthquake on the island of Capri which I had allowed to swallow her, but
-whom I now unearthed, none the worse except in the matter of a broken
-wrist,—I think it was a wrist,—and in a month or so received a very
-fair-sized check for the tale of her experiences.
-
-The same sort of exterior pressure, not any interior need of expression,
-was what led to the production of a tale which ran for eighteen months
-as a serial in the “Catholic World” under the title of “Katharine,” and
-during that period provided for our necessary expenditures. Henry Holt
-republished it with a new name which he himself suggested. I liked the
-first one better, but it made too little difference to me to make it
-worth while to adhere to my own views. Mr. Kirk, by the way, had also
-renamed my sketch: that seems to be a privilege with literary sponsors,
-the literary parent not being present. Almost an entire chapter was also
-eliminated from the book, because the reader, whose name I never knew,
-objected to it on the ground that it showed too plainly that “Mrs. Martin
-really believed” that a certain tenet of her faith was absolutely true.
-
-I began a second story on the heels of this one, but when it had run to
-some thirty thousand words, Homer objected to it as certain to split upon
-the same dogmatic rock as its predecessor, and I laid it aside for a
-third one which attained the same proportions and pleased every one who
-then or thereafter read it better than either of its predecessors. But it
-had the misfortune of not specially interesting me; and yet there was a
-baby in it with the second sight, who bade fair to develop into something
-“mystic, wonderful,” in course of time, if not interfered with. Meantime,
-the imperative need for production on my part having ended, I put the
-unfinished manuscript in the fire some three years ago. The second one I
-completed after our return to New York, and it was published under the
-title of “John Van Alstyne’s Factory,” in the “Catholic World.”
-
-To Homer our life in France was chiefly seed-time. There germinated
-his “Low Tide at Villerville,” the “Honfleur Lights,” the “Criquebœuf
-Church,” the “Normandy Trees,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Sun Worshipers,”
-and the landscape known in the Metropolitan Gallery of New York, where
-it now hangs, as a “View on the Seine,”—which, in strictness, it is
-not,—but for which his own title was “The Harp of the Winds.” I had
-asked him what he meant to call it, and, with his characteristic aversion
-to putting his deeper sentiments into words, he answered that he supposed
-it would seem too sentimental to call it by the name I have just given,
-but that was what it meant to him, for he had been thinking of music all
-the while he was painting it. And this reminds me of a commission given
-him by a music-lover among his friends during our early days in New York
-to “paint a Beethoven symphony” for him. He did it, too, and to the
-utmost satisfaction of its possessor.
-
-[Illustration: ON THE SEINE (“HARP OF THE WINDS”)
-
-Reproduced from the original painting in the Metropolitan Museum, New
-York]
-
-He used to carry about with him in those days a pocket sketch-book in
-which he noted his impressions in water-color. Mr. Brownell must remember
-it, and so, I think, must Mr. Russell Sturgis, for, being at our rooms
-during my husband’s last sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic, when
-he was known to be afflicted with an incurable malady, he said to me that
-if Homer’s things were ever put up for sale, he would like to become
-the purchaser of this book. My husband never got over his chagrin when
-it became evident that it must have fallen a prey to some unscrupulous
-packer of our household goods at the time when he concluded to follow
-me to St. Paul, in June, 1893. He had a suspicion that it might have
-found its way to a pawnbroker, and never gave up hoping for its ultimate
-recovery. It had in it some delightful miniature bits of character and
-color.
-
-It was in Villerville also that he began the “Sand Dunes on Lake
-Ontario,” now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, with the
-intention of sending it to the Salon. But before it was completed he got
-into one of those hobbles which were not uncommon in his experience, when
-the more he tried to hurry the less he was in reality accomplishing. It
-was in no condition to be seen when the last day for sending came, as we
-both agreed, yet he sent it. Naturally enough, it was rejected. I think
-that result surprised him less than it momentarily annoyed him. He put
-the canvas aside and for months never touched it. But one day during the
-next season, while he was painting on it, a French landscapist and his
-wife came to call upon us. I forget his name. He studied it in silence
-for a long time. Then turning to me, he said: “Your husband’s work
-reminds me strongly of that of Pointelin. He must send this canvas to the
-next Salon.” “It has been there once,” said I, “and the jury rejected
-it,” adding, because of his evident surprise, “It was not then in its
-present condition.” “Nevertheless,” he replied, “I cannot understand a
-French jury rejecting such a picture in any state in which Mr. Martin
-would have sent it in at all.”
-
-I do not remember just why we removed from Villerville. Perhaps because
-Homer was able to obtain in Honfleur a roomy and well-lighted studio
-apart from our dwelling-place, an arrangement which he always preferred.
-The little city from which William the Norman set out on his conquering
-expedition in 1066 had not the picturesque charm of the village we
-left, but possessed compensating features in the way of English and
-American neighbors. Our whole sojourn in France was, in fact, delightful,
-and perhaps even more so to me than to my husband. Through my mother
-there was a good deal of French blood in my veins, and in its ancestral
-environment it throbbed with a rhythmic atavism unknown elsewhere to my
-pulses.
-
-I think that notwithstanding the excellent lighting arrangements of his
-studio, my husband did not complete much work in Honfleur. “The Mussel
-Gatherers,” to me one of the most impressive of his later canvases,
-was finished there, and though I do not recall another for the Artist
-Fund Sale, I suppose there must have been one. A never-completed studio
-interior with a portrait of me, and reproductions in miniature of the
-studies hanging on the walls; still another small portrait, a number of
-panels, one of which, “Wild Cherry Trees,” was in the Clarke Sale in
-1897, and various water-colors belong likewise to this period. Meanwhile
-his note-books were filling up with material for future use.
-
-I sailed for New York at the end of August, 1886, and Homer, who had
-remained to finish some of the things I have just named, followed
-me three months later, arriving December 12th of that year. In the
-following spring he secured one of the studios in Fifty-fifth Street,
-having previously utilized for that purpose a room with a north light
-in an apartment we had in Sixty-third Street. In his more convenient
-quarters he painted a few great pictures, among them the “Low Tide at
-Villerville,” the “Sun Worshipers,” and still another, the title of
-which I never knew, and which I never saw until much later, when going
-one day with the late Miss a’Becket to the Eden Musée,—I think to see
-something of her own in an exhibition then in progress, of paintings
-belonging to private owners,—this great canvas faced me on the line of
-the opposite wall, and startled me into the exclamation: “That must be
-one of Homer’s!” It was full of light and color. The land on the left
-sloped gradually down nearly to the middle of the foreground, and the
-wonderful sheet of water behind and beyond it that fairly rippled out of
-the frame, was dazzling. What he called it I do not know. To each other
-we never gave his landscapes any name, nor did he to any one else unless
-a purchaser required a title, or there was question of a catalogue.
-I think, however, that this canvas may be one which was completed in
-January, 1889, while I was in Toledo, and which was bought almost as soon
-as finished by Mr. Thomas B. Clarke. If so, it changed hands very soon,
-and was possibly taken away from New York. Homer wrote me at the time
-about the sale. From all I could learn of the Memorial Exhibition at the
-Century Club in the spring of 1897—an exhibition which, to my lasting
-regret, closed just before I was able to reach New York—this picture was
-not included in it.
-
-[Illustration: TREES NEAR VILLERVILLE
-
-Reproduced from the original water color in the collection of Mr. Wm.
-Macbeth]
-
-His last studio in New York—occupied from 1890 until he went to St.
-Paul in June, 1893—was in a house belonging to the Paulist Fathers
-and adjoining their Convent in Fifty-ninth Street. There he painted the
-“Normandy Trees,” the “Haunted House” I have already referred to as
-belonging to Dr. D. M. Stimson, the “Honfleur Lights” now owned by the
-Century Club, and began the “Criquebœuf Church,” afterward completed
-in St. Paul. In that house I first observed that his eyesight, always
-imperfect, was becoming still more dim. Never till then had I known him
-to ask any one to trace an outline for him. He thought, moreover, that
-some serious internal trouble threatened him, and consulted both an
-oculist and a physician. In the early summer of 1892, believing that an
-ocean voyage would benefit him, he availed himself of the opportunity
-afforded by the sale to the Century Club of the “Honfleur Lights” and
-sailed for the last time to England. He spent a very considerable part
-of his absence at Bournemouth, where resided the family of Mr. George
-Chalmers, friendship with whom must, I think, have been coeval with
-his entire life in New York, and lasted, on the part of the survivor,
-far beyond it. Concerning this visit, Mr. Chalmers wrote me a few
-years later, in reply to my request that he should tell me about it:
-“I do not feel that I can do Homer the justice he deserves. Certainly
-that visit greatly endeared him to me and to my wife, and even to our
-Harold, who was then a little mite, but who remembers him well. I wish I
-could remember some of Homer’s talk, always so charming, on our various
-outings during that happy time—especially about pictures, a subject with
-which he was eminently so familiar. Two visits to the National Gallery
-in London I recall in a general sort of way, to be sure. I remember
-how stirred he was as we stood before the two Turners in the National
-Gallery, presented by the artist on condition that they should be placed
-next to the Claudes. Homer regarded Turner’s challenging comparison with
-the great Frenchman as the sheerest audacity, and called attention to
-the fussiness and labored work of the Turners compared with the ease and
-serene dignity and splendor of the Claudes.”
-
-Curiously enough, Mr. Chalmers arrived in New York from London the next
-day after my own arrival from St. Paul, in April, 1897, and took what I
-am sure could not have been altogether agreeable pains in order to render
-me a very important service.
-
-During this last absence of my husband from America, I spent a part of
-my own vacation in Ottawa, and while there received a letter in which
-he asked me to write to the oculist who had examined him—I think it
-was Dr. Bull—and find out from him precisely what was the condition
-of his eyes. I did so, and received the painful verdict that the optic
-nerve of one of them was dead, while the other was partially clouded by
-a cataract. I mention these facts in order that my readers may get an
-adequate conception of the enormous difficulties under which his latest
-paintings were begun and finished. Among these is the autumnal known as
-“The Adirondacks,” exhibited at the Century Club Memorial Exhibition,
-and bought shortly afterward by Mr. Untermyer at the sale of Mr. T. B.
-Clarke’s collection. Looking at it when he was giving his final touches,
-I said to him: “Homer, if you never paint another stroke, you will go out
-in a blaze of glory!” “I have learned to paint, at last,” he answered.
-“If I were quite blind now, and knew just where the colors were on my
-palette, I could express myself.” Another belonging to this period is
-the “View on the Seine” already referred to, and which in an earlier
-stage was, to my mind, still more beautiful than it is at present. In
-its primitive condition—and, indeed, from the moment when it was first
-charcoaled on the canvas, the trees so grouped that they suggested by
-their very contour the Harp to which he was inwardly listening—it was
-supremely elegant. Elegance is still its characteristic feature, but I
-wish he had left it as I saw it first. “The trees were about four hundred
-feet high!” he objected, when I told him so, and I did not then, and
-do not now, see the force of the objection. It was a thing of beauty,
-anyhow, and who but a pedant measures those except by the optical
-illusion and spiritual impression they produce?
-
-It was I who went first to St. Paul, where our elder son resided, hoping
-to recover by means of a long rest from the fatigue entailed by incessant
-mental labor. I had been editing, reviewing, translating, finishing a
-novel, besides keeping house, and began to feel as if my own mainspring
-were liable to snap at any moment. This was at the end of December, 1892.
-I went, intending to return, and to continue the writing of book reviews
-during my absence. But in February I broke down completely, gave up all
-work and all expectation of resuming it in New York. In the following
-June, Homer resigned his studio and followed me, stopping on the way to
-see the Chicago Exposition, where several of his paintings were on view.
-
-In St. Paul he had for a while a very good studio in one of the life
-insurance buildings, and while there completed several pictures, among
-them that of the “Criquebœuf Church,” selling it, almost as soon as it
-reached New York, to Mr. William T. Evans. This building was sold, soon
-afterward, and converted to uses which made it impossible as a studio.
-
-If my memory serves me correctly, it was in the spring of 1894 that the
-Century Club had a reunion of more than ordinary importance. The special
-date and occasion I do not recall, but I know that Homer’s presence was
-so urgently desired by some of his friends that he then paid his last
-visit to New York, and to the place and associates in it which had given
-him most satisfaction. He was absent some six weeks, possibly more, and
-I have since been told that when he left, his physical condition was
-such that his friends not merely gave up hope of seeing him again, but
-expected speedy tidings of his death. But the end was not so near. It was
-to be preceded by such a conquest of mind over matter, of sheer will over
-propensities both inherited and acquired, of triumphant performance in
-the face of physical obstacles apparently insurmountable as is altogether
-unique in my experience. Such efforts are never made, I take it, except
-under the stimulus of hope, and even that sheet-anchor often fails when
-the soul is pusillanimous. But Homer Martin was no coward. Moreover, he
-had always been his own severest critic. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler has
-quoted him as saying in earlier years when the hangmen exalted him “above
-the line” in exhibitions, and buyers accepted that verdict as conclusive:
-“If I could only do it, they would see it fast enough.” Mr. Schuyler
-adds: “But this was more modest than exact. Even after he had attained
-the capacity to ‘do it,’ to make canvas palpitate with light and color,
-as the visitors to the Memorial Exhibition know, the picture-buyers of
-twenty years ago still failed to ‘see it.’”
-
-[Illustration: CAPE TRINITY
-
-Reproduced from the original drawing in the collection of Mr. Wm.
-Macbeth]
-
-But, at the period of his life with which I am now concerned, he was not
-only conscious that he had attained full mastery of his own power of
-artistic expression by means of color, but he had reason to believe that
-an opportunity had been afforded him to make that mastery triumphantly
-evident. Although his faith turned out to be ill-founded, yet his belief
-to the contrary was sufficient to make him rise at once to his full
-strength and shake off without apparent effort whatever other shackles
-had hitherto confined him. He was like nothing so much as blind Samson
-after his hair had grown, and he carried off the gates of old habits
-and flung them aside as easily as if he had never felt their weight. In
-the late spring of that year he went away alone to a quiet farm, taking
-with him the canvases on which “The Adirondacks,” the “Seine View,”
-and the “Normandy Farm” were already charcoaled, and set to work at
-their development and completion. From time to time he would come into
-the city, his step alert and his physical improvement so apparent in
-every way, that my apprehension that his health was already shattered
-irreparably gave way to confidence that years of life and successful
-achievement were still before him. As for him, I think he never fully
-believed that the doctors were right in considering his bodily condition
-hopeless until a short time before his death. He had always looked
-confidently forward to such length of days as both of his parents and
-others of his more remote forbears had attained. “I never thought,”
-he said to me one night, a week or two before his death, “that I was
-shortening my life in this way.” As to his blindness, it never became
-entire, and having been accustomed from the beginning to defective vision
-while yet absorbing his material through the eye and appealing to it in
-his production, he had, in a measure bewildering to hear of and barely
-credible to us who beheld it in its final efforts, learned to rely almost
-entirely on his inward vision and the hand which responded as it were
-instinctively to its impulse and suggestion.
-
-The pictures I have named went to New York in the late autumn of
-1895, and were at once acknowledged with hearty words of praise and a
-preliminary check. My husband was back at home by this time, and, full
-of vigor and the anticipation of assured success, had begun three or four
-other landscapes. Only one of these was ever completed, but that was so
-present to his imagination, and his steady hand moved in such obedience
-to his will, that it took visible shape almost without an effort. He had
-begun making plans for the future and seemed to have renewed his youth.
-And then, when the year was nearly ended, his hopes were shattered by the
-tidings that the pictures were found to be unsalable, and had been, or
-were to be, transferred to other hands which might or might not be more
-successful in finding purchasers for them.
-
-This was the end, so far as further work was concerned. My Samson fell
-once more into the hands of the Philistines, and this time not to rise
-again.
-
-[Illustration: A NEWPORT LANDSCAPE (The Artist’s Last Work)
-
-Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Frank L.
-Babbott, Esq.]
-
-Over those final days, I have not the heart to linger. In all ways, they
-were inexpressibly painful. In August of the following year, a growth in
-his throat made its appearance. Although it never caused him intense
-physical anguish until a few days before his death, when it seemed to
-have made its way to the brain, it caused him great discomfort. So long
-as hope remained that it was not malignant and might be removed, he felt
-and expressed an irritation which, under the precise circumstances,
-was only natural. But when, late in October, about the time of his
-sixtieth birthday, the specialist who was attending him pronounced it
-cancerous, his mood changed. Certain thoughts, certain memories, certain
-injustices of which he had felt himself the victim, would still move him
-to indignation when the recollection of them recurred, but he bore his
-physical trials with wonderful and unalterable patience. A Unitarian
-clergyman in the neighborhood began calling on him in the early winter
-and contributed much to his entertainment in some of my unavoidable
-absences. But, as Christmas was approaching, my husband asked me to
-request the Reverend Doctor Shields, now Professor of Psychology in
-the Catholic University at Washington, D. C., to pay him a visit. Said
-he: “L⸺ is a good fellow; he thinks just as I do about the tariff
-and the civil service, and he likes good books. But, what all that has
-to do with his profession, considered as a profession, I do not clearly
-see.” Therefore I preferred his request to Dr. Shields, who might
-reasonably have refused it, as he was not doing parish duty but employed
-in laboratory work at the Ecclesiastical Seminary in St. Paul. He came,
-nevertheless, a number of times, paying his last visit on the Saturday
-evening before Homer died. And then, before leaving, he said to me:
-“There is not the ghost of a hope that your husband will do just exactly
-what you wish him to do. And, for my part, I am content to leave him in
-the hands of God just as he is. He is absolutely honest. If he could take
-another step forward, he would do it.” And, on his part, Homer said to
-me, “Father Shields has the clearest mind of any man I ever met. I wish I
-had known him three years ago. But now my head is in such anguish that
-I can no longer keep three or four threads of argument in my mind at the
-same time.”
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-One day in Honfleur, Homer broke a protracted silence by saying, “I
-hope that I shall die before you do.” To which I answered, “I hope so
-too.” “You think that you could get along better without me than I could
-without you?” he asked, and I said, “I know I could.” And now, two days
-before he died, he said, “I am glad that I am going first”; adding a
-few more words which it pleases me to remember, but which I shall not
-repeat. And again I told him that I was glad also. Later still, he asked
-me what I meant to do when he was gone, and when I said I hoped to enter
-a convent, he replied, “That is just what I supposed. Well, it is a
-beautiful life.”
-
-
-
-
-
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