authoritative in their time.
Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent aid and inspiration; and thus, that
“Man is his own star,”
is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre and with lofty ideals
“Leads a frustrate life and blind,
For the lack of favoring gales
Blowing blithe on other sails.”
Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth. With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his poem—one far too little known—the “Io Victis”:—
“I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life—
The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife;
Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim
Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame,
But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,
*****
Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes burned in ashes away,
From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood at the dying of day
With the wreck of their life all around them. …”
In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life—as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:—
“… I stand on the field of defeat,
In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and dying, and there
*****
Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, ‘They only the victory win
Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight—if need be, to die.’ ”
Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature.
For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story’s literary work—in his contributions of essays and poems to the Atlantic Monthly; in his published works, the “Roba di Roma,” “Conversations in a Studio,” his collected “Poems,” and others—gave him a not transitory rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in art.
Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the Seven-hilled City—Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story, though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:—
“Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy,
Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys.”
THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES
Elihu Vedder
If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the æsthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight; the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that meet outside space and time and question each other’s identity; the dead that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral, through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert—it is these that are the realm of Vedder’s art, and what has the normal world of portrait and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a class, an order, of its own, and considered as being—Vedderesque? It seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?—
“The Muse can knit
What is past, what is done,
With the web that’s just begun.”
How can he find the design to phrase his thought—this painter of ideas?
“Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?”
Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul’s native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the Cumæan Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply—the art of Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art, any parallel to these works.
One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the artist might reply:—
“I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon.
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me, who only jewels crave?
*****
I’m
