William James Stillman

“ I had only recently recovered from my wandering into the wilderness of doubt, and my religious faith was as vivid as when I had been at my mother's knee—Providence ruled, and God answered prayer. This phase of my life, juvenile as I now perceive it to be, I respect as the most honest in it. I honor the weakness as I cannot always what seems the later strength. Those who read my life may put the estimate on it which suits their creed; I only speak of it as a phenomenon of my Puritan youth. ”

“ Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were adored by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as the earth feels sunshine, which sinks into the fertile soil and bears its fruit in a richer harvest.
Excepting Holmes, Norton, and Longfellow, our company included most of what was most distinct in the world in which we lived, with some who were eminent only in their social relations, and who neither cared to be nor ever became of interest to the general world. ”

“ We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the genius loci. One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. ”

“ Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking. He had never been out of France, had never seen the Alps, and did not care for mountain scenery, but concentrated all his feelings and labor on what he used to call "sujets intimes," the picturesque nooks of landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where nature is tamed to an intimacy with the domestic spirit, or where she vainly struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders of the forest of Fontainebleau. ”

“ Watching for deer from a treetop one day, in broad sunlight, and looking over a mountain range, along the crest of which were pointed firs and long level ridges of rock in irregular alternation, the eerie feeling suddenly came over me, and the mountain-top seemed a city with spires and walls, and I heard bands of music, and then hunting-horns coming down with the wind, and there was a perfect illusion of the sound of a hunting party hurrying down into the valley, which gave me a positive panic, as if I were being pursued and must run. ”

“ The humanity of the backwoods was on a lower level than that of a New England village—more material if less worldly; the men got intoxicated, and some of the women—nothing less like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York. I saw one day a hunter who had come into the woods with a motive in some degree like mine—impatience of the restraints and burdens of civilization, and pure love of solitude. He had become, not bestialized, like most of the men I saw, but animalized—he had drifted back into the condition of his dog, with his higher intellect inert. ”

“ I came out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist were past. ”

“ If to live in the world as if not of it indicates a saintly nature, then Robert Browning the elder was a saint: a serene, untroubled soul, conscious of no moral or theological problem to disturb his serenity, and as gentle as a gentle woman,—a man in whom, it seemed to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank acceptance of life as he found it come to him. ”

“ I see things dispassionately and as an old man removed from the chance of personal gains or losses, and, but for a faith in human progress being the result of an eternal and inevitable law, I should say that the blood of that war had been wasted. It is a painful conviction to die with,—but I expect to die with it,—that generations and unparalleled disasters must pass before my country reaches the goal its founders believed to be its destiny. ”

“ Except myself, the whole company are dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking has disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and become a horror to see; but, among the memories which are the only realities left to it, this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the forest stands out alone, and I feel as if I had stood for a moment on a mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical American, the noblest in the idealization of the American, of all the race. ”

“ There was a marquis whose income was one hundred francs a month, and a count whose father gave him five sous and a piece of bread for his breakfast when he left home, but the rest were plebeians, with neither past nor future, whose enthusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon. I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes of artist life—seeing the content and even happiness which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and endless labor. ”

“ I had always been a greedy reader of books, and especially of histories and the natural sciences,—everything in the vegetable or animal world fascinated me,—and I had no ambition for academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest—the years when, if ever, the artist is made. ”

“ The crystalline limpidity of his character, free from all conventions, prejudices, or personal color, gave a facility for study of the man, limited only by the range of vision of the student. How far my vision was competent for this study is not for me to decide; so far as it went I profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique, not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect receptivity, and devotion to the truth. ”

“ Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments will surpass themselves as we go on, but to be, as Emerson was, is absolute and complete existence.
Agassiz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of knowledge of all the men I have ever known. No one who did not know him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into relations with him. ”

“ I waited till the spring homesickness made it too irksome to live quietly in Paris, and then finding that the revolution so long waited for had gone by, I went home and to my painting.
In American landscape the element of the picturesque is in a serious deficiency. What is old is the wild and savage, the backwoods and the wild mountain, with no trace of human presence or association to give it sentiment; what is new is still in the crude and angular state in which the utilities are served, and the comfort of the man and his belongings most considered. ”

“ There was a gracious indolence in him, an imperturbable serenity, which made proclamation in advance of a truce to all forms of brute collision. No doubt if they had hunted him out for a victim of the political animosity which led to so many tragedies in the early days of our anti-slavery agitation, he would have stood up to the stake as gayly as one of the martyrs of old; but the man's nature was repugnant to discords, and shrank from combats ruder than those of the printing-press. ”

“ Church in many respects was the most remarkable painter of the phenomena of nature I have ever known, and had he been trained in a school of wider scope, he might have taken a place amongst the great individualities of his art. But he had little imagination, and his technical training had not emancipated him from an exaggerated insistence on detail, which so completely controlled his treatment of his subject that breadth and repose were entirely lost sight of. A graceful composition, and most happy command of all the actual effects of the landscape which he had seen, were his highest qualities ”

“ I was ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found, what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature with no suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual existence.
One of my artist friends—S.R. Gifford, landscape painter, like myself on the search for new subjects—had been, the year before, to the Saranac Lakes, and gave me the clue to the labyrinth, and I found on Upper Saranac Lake a log cabin, inhabited by a farmer whose family consisted of a wife, a son, and a daughter. ”

“ It was probably this characteristic of my condition which enlisted the sympathy of Lowell, who, even in his desolation, had a heart for any form of devotion, and who, with the love of nature which was one of his own most marked traits, had a side to which my enthusiasm appealed directly. The mere artist is, unless his nature is a radically religious one, an egotist, and his art necessarily centres on him, nature only furnishing him with material. ”

“ Even then, with my limited knowledge of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,—one too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too negligent and running into indecision; and this judgment still holds. Of Davidson, my immediate teacher, there was only to be got certain ways of doing certain things, limited to the elements of landscape; how to wash in the sky, to treat foliage in masses, and those tricks of the brush in which the English water-color school abounds; but no larger views, or more individual, of art itself. ”

“ But Agassiz was no sectarian, and held no other creed than a belief in the Creator. In the fibre of the man was the consciousness of the immanent deity, rooted, perhaps, in that influence of his early theological environage from which no man can ever escape, though he may rebel against it; and the almost universal deduction by the scientific world from Darwin's theory then was that there could be no divine design in creation. It was this negation of the direction of the great artist in the process of creation against which Agassiz rebelled ”

“ In all this complexity of forces we were as helpless as feathers in the wind, cut off from mother earth as much as if we were carried away on the clouds; the feeling of absolute insignificance growing on one as the ship drove on, the creaking of the ship and the hissing rush of the waters hardly audible for the shrieking of the gale through the rigging. In all my life I have never so understood the utter impotence and triviality of humanity as I felt it then. ”

“ We climbed the Saleve, and I saw what gave me more pleasure, I confess, than the distant view of Mont Blanc, which he expected me to be enthusiastic over,—the soldanella and gentians. The great accidents of nature,—Niagara and the high Alps,—though they awe me, have always left me cold; and all that summer I should have been more fruitfully employed in some nook of English scenery, where nature went undisturbed by catastrophes and cataclysms. ”

“ We landed from the Rhine steamer in the night, finding the streets deserted even by the police, and dimly lighted by oil lamps hung across them at wide intervals, and I wandered a long time at random with my valise in hand, searching for a hotel, and not meeting a living person to ask guidance of. I blundered at length on a little inn in whose drinking-room still burned a light, and in which I found a night's lodging. Such a primitive state of civilization was to me, fresh from Paris and Brussels, romantic. ”

“ I was, in knowledge of worldly life, scarcely less a child then than I had been when, at the age of ten, I determined to go out into the world and make my own career, free from the obstacles I imagined to be preventing me from following my ideals. The ever-present feeling developed in me by the religious training of my mother, that an overruling Providence had my life in keeping, made me quite oblivious of or indifferent to the chances of disaster, for the assurance of protection and leading to the best end left no place for anxieties. ”

“ Of Clough I saw a good deal, though his occupation in a government office left him not much leisure; and it seemed to me that, of all public officials I ever knew, he was the most misplaced at an office desk. Of fragile health and with the temperament of a poet, gentle as a woman can be, he often reminded me of Pegasus in harness. I had a commission from Norton to paint a small full-length portrait of him, and had several sittings; but it did not get on to suit me, and his being compelled to go to Italy for his health before I had finished with it, for well or ill, put an end to it. ”

“ I had read with enthusiasm "Modern Painters," and absorbed the views of Ruskin in large draughts, and enjoyed large intercourse with European masters, and with Americans like William Page, H.K. Brown, S.W. Rowse, and H.P. Gray, all thinkers and artists of distinct eminence. In this school I had acquired certain views of the nature of art which I burned to disseminate. They were crude rather than incorrect, but they were largely responded to by our public; they were destructive of the old rather than informing of the new, and leaned on nature rather than art. ”