Read Ebook: Homer Martin a Reminiscence October 28 1836-February 12 1897 by Martin Elizabeth Gilbert

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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 "Criqueboeuf 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.

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 Mus?e,--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.

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 "Criqueboeuf 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 "Criqueboeuf 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.'"

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.

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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