Chapter I: Introduction: A YANKEE HERITAGE xiii

I. MAKING MY EARLY HISTORY.—CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1

II. FINDING MY WINGS.—HARVARD COLLEGE 24

III. IN SEARCH OF A CAREER.—OUT WEST 43

IV. ON BEING A TENDERFOOT.—NORTH OF CALIFORNIA 76

V. ADVENTURES IN ÆSTHETICISM.—PARIS AND STUDENT DAYS 117

VI. THE MIDDLE AGES.—BRITTANY; SPAIN 141

VII. FROM BRETON TO BRITON.—ST. IVES, CORNWALL; LONDON 162

VIII. SUMMER ADVENTURINGS.—I. CARRIÈRE ST. DENISE. II. BARBIZON. III. MONTREUIL. IV. GREZ. V. STUTTGART 184

IX. FIRST DECORATIONS 202

X. DEMOCRACY AND THE FINE ARTS 219

XI. STANFORD WHITE 237

XII. FINE ARTS IN RELATION TO “A NUMBER OF THINGS” 256

XIII. THE PLAYERS 279

XIV. AMERICAN HUMOR 303

XV. PAINT AND PAINTERS 321

XVI. IN RETROSPECT 342

ILLUSTRATIONS

PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece_
Etching by Will Simmons, from a photograph by Benjamin
Kimball

THE OLD MANSE AT CONCORD _Facing p._ 2

SARAH ALDEN (BRADFORD) RIPLEY „ 10

EDWARD SIMMONS AT THE AGE OF SEVEN „ 16

MARY EMERSON (RIPLEY) SIMMONS „ 22

“THE CARPENTER’S SON” „ 178

“JUSTICE” „ 212

“THE THREE FATES” „ 218

“MELPOMENE” „ 236

“JANUARY” „ 258

“THE RETURN OF THE FLAGS” „ 272

“CLEANSING THE SOIL OF THE BAD ELEMENTS” „ 330

EDWARD SIMMONS AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY „ 340

Interruption

If some curious reader, chancing upon this foreword to the narrative of the life of Edward Simmons, should require my reason for calling it an Interruption instead of an Introduction, I might reply with the obvious evasion that so distinguished a painter as Edward Simmons needs no introduction.

The recipient of medals innumerable, and the most flattering mention in every European capital, surely should need no introduction even in his own country, many of whose public buildings and galleries are enriched by examples of his work in decoration, portraiture, or genre.

But this, as I have said, would be an evasion and not my true reason for calling my preface an interruption, and since the curiosity that can drive a reader to the perusal of matter that is essentially deterrent, wholly superfluous, and probably dull must be of a persistence that will brook no gainsay, I will make a virtue of compulsion and narrate for that reader’s private enlightenment a story of a very personal nature concerning Mr. Simmons, the telling of which I had rather hoped to avoid.

The story, in so far as it is related to the title of this preface, speaks for itself, and since it bears upon a personal characteristic of the painter, inherited, I am told, from generations of oratorical forebears, a characteristic which also speaks for itself, I must ask the reader to regard it as strictly confidential and to allow it to go no further.

Picture then, Curious Reader, a Boston dinner party at which Mr. Edward Simmons as guest of honor is exercising without let or hindrance the lingual accomplishment bequeathed to him by generations of eloquent forebears, and demonstrating to a fresh audience that the supposed “lost art of conversation” was not so much lost as cornered.

A dinner party, however, even a Boston dinner party, has in addition to its social and intellectual side a practical, alimentary aspect not to be ignored by anyone, particularly an artist. And since the act of obtaining nourishment employs the function of swallowing, and the function of swallowing cannot be successfully synchronized with that of speech, there were of necessity occasional brief pauses in the flow of oratory.

It was at the moment of one of these unavoidable pauses that a lady (to be remembered, as was the “clergyman” who interrupted Dr. Johnson, only by her temerity) seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

Now the traffic laws that regulate the respective movements of the human pharynx and larynx are as inexorable as those that govern our public highways, and at the same instant that the lady opened her mouth to speak, the Edwardian larynx resumed its right of way.

“Oh, pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I interrupted you,” was all she could manage to gasp.

“Madam,” replied Simmons, with the Chesterfieldian smile the gift of which many an Academician would give all his decorations to possess—“madam, no one can _speak_ without interrupting me!”

And that is why I have chosen to call my impertinent preface to a narrative which for human interest can (to my thinking) be compared only to that of Benvenuto Cellini, an— But pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I am interrupting you!

OLIVER HERFORD.

Introduction
_A Yankee Heritage_

For years I have wanted to make two cartoons—the first, dated 1800, to be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, “New England with Her Child America.” In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England, is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to grab the reins. He yells:

“Ma, if you don’t stop that there will be trouble!”

I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years, until, without his mother’s realizing it, he has slipped quietly from home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is still the young mother of the cartoon.

My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who embarked upon the _Mayflower_ in search of a far-off land where they might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have never been able to find that this pure English lineage had been broken during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for centuries before that in the old country.

From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred of kings; a lack of rhythm—the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred of restraint in any form.

From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of my birth: “I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke Webster.”

My father died before I was old enough to know him, but I got quite a vivid picture of his side of the family from a distant relative whom I met by accident one day. He said: “The Simmonses have always been a long-legged set of lazy galoots. We have had great success with the other sex. We have been able to do one thing a little better than other folks and stick to it until we have about a thousand dollars—then we sit down and loaf until it is gone.”

Mother was different. When she was a girl she had a serious talk with her dad, telling him it was foolish for her to study piano or music of any kind.

“What is your ambition?” he asked.

“To scrub a kitchen floor better than anyone else,” she replied; and he succumbed, his New England nature realizing that, after all, it might be well to have one practical person in the family. Mother’s thrifty streak came in very useful, for a young widow with four lusty children to feed did not have an easy time in those days. The sun never rose upon her asleep and her small economies were ever her own pride and the butt of our selfish derision. After her day’s work was over, it was my delight—little brute that I was—to lie in bed and listen to her voice, reading to me from some story of delicious adventure. When her head drooped and the book fell from her hands, I, still wide awake, would whine and finally yell, until she pulled herself together and went on. Mother’s day was an endless round of doing something for others.

From the land where these first American ancestors of mine settled so long ago, I get the shape of my body and the contour of my face. I look more like an Iroquois Indian than an Englishman. Some historian has remarked that the change in the Yankee is due to intermarriage with the redskins. Imagine the spectacle of a staid Governor Bradford wedded to an Indian squaw! Two hundred years of the same climate, the same food, and the same life produced the same type, that’s all.

From Seven to Seventy

“Mon verre n’est pas grand
Mais je bois dans mon verre.”
ALFRED DE MUSSET