Arts and Letters

Thoughtful students of men have sometimes agreed that the mission of man is expression; an expression directed by attempts to accommodate himself to the unyielding elements in his environment, and his achievements in adjusting the flexible elements to his own needs and vision. Francis Hopkinson Smith was notable for his success on both sides of this readjustment, and for his expression of the results as measured by his own emotional reactions. He was an artist, which is to say that he was observantly conscious of his own emotions and possessed a definite avenue and method for communicating them intelligibly to his fellow-men. He was always conscious of the law of gravitation, conscious of the plumb-line and the horizon, of the perpendicular and the level; always too sane for that tolerable degree of seeming madness to which genius is allied. But he had the permanent and fine sense of proportion that is the parent of talent. Concerning those merely apprehended and haunted heights which only music explores or the lyrical line reflects he was silent. But within the circumference of his vision he saw definitely, clearly, securely, and was alive with expression to his very finger-tips. With pencil and brush, with written and spoken word, he was truthful and persuasive, and had a degree of mastery that not only permitted but compelled him to be playful. He could ride any of his hobbies bareback; and if the Olympian hostler had parked Pegasus in his paddock, he would have been merciful to the creature but quite unafraid, and would have unremittingly made him earn his feed.

By profession he was a mechanical engineer. His avocations were drawing, painting, writing, speaking; in each he gained a notable eminence. Born in the city of Baltimore, his point of view, his mental attitude towards life, his courtly bearing were those of the Southerner as America understands the term. With the Southerner’s traditions and training and with the principal facts from which a Southern deduction is made, women in his treatment were always objects of romance and to be protected. The casual Russian female traveler in the compartment of a Continental car was for him a Princess, and on no initiative of his could have been considered as an adventuress or vampire.

There is a legend, perhaps a record, in our war for independence to the effect that when Lord Howe reported to the British Admiralty that the Americans had fled up the Bronx River he received an order by return messenger to take a gunboat and pursue them. There was no wider difference between the physical fact and the British Ministry's apprehension than there was between the actual River Bronx and Hopkinson Smith's poetical and romantic description of it in his Day at Laguerre's. Commuters moving towards New York on the New Haven road, passing the cemetery at Woodlawn, look to their left on a little creek not wider than the suburban dining-rooms they have left and at one point on its further bank a collection of sheds, a broken grape-arbor, a dilapidated two-story building. This undesirable property, seen with Hopkinson Smith's ability to transmute the ordinary into the beautiful, became a sylvan stream across which the weary traveler halloed to a girl who pushed over with her small paddle-boat and carried him into the desirable Arcadia where he was to spend his summer day.

Some critics have found a test of a novelist's rank in the number of enduring portraits that he has contributed. It takes time to make these recognizable and quotable. But we can believe that Colonel Carter will pass into type and stencil as definite as Micawber.

On the platform as a reader Hopkinson Smith was effective, with resonant voice, clear diction, lively expression, and simple and eloquent gesture. As a speaker without a manuscript he was ready and forceful. He had opinions on most important subjects, and was sufficiently partisan to be effective.

Some English essayist, making a distinction between the climate of France and that of England, regarded the French weather as rather incidental to the landscape, but in England he said the weather always seemed to be sitting for its portrait. That writer had only a fraction of the perspective of Francis Hopkinson Smith, for whom the weather the world over seemed always ready for the painter. Every day had for him its particular enveloping atmosphere. This was so fundamental a recognition that his portfolio was filled with large water-color cartons of different shades. He looked at the day and drew from this collection of pastel tints the paper that was in harmony with the time, and painted on it the physical scene that he had selected and to which transcription he lent the beauty of his temperament. His most notable work as an artist was in water-color. If he did not make a picture a day, he at least started one and carried it far enough to make it secure in his record during the season that he devoted to this avocation. While his most notable work was in this medium, the most effective things he did were charcoal illustrations made with an architectural truth but without servility, and executed with a courage that would have been primitive if not so modified by the poetry in the man. Doré, in his illustrations of Jerrold's Pilgrimage of London, with the assistance of the wonderful engravers that made his India washes eloquent, fell somewhat short of the convincing effect that Hopkinson Smith got into his charcoal drawings and preserved through their process reproductions.

In his early youth he had been a clerk in an iron works. After entering his profession of engineer he built the seawall around Governor's Island, another at Tompkinsville, Staten Island, the Race Rock Light House off New London, and the foundation at Bedloe's Island for the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. The battles with tide and wind and storm he records in his stories, perhaps unconscious that nature had already incorporated them in his acquired character. His inherited temperament was predisposed to their acquisition. If one had to symbolize him by some selection from the animal kingdom the eagle would furnish the nearest type.

As an artist he received a bronze medal from the Buffalo Exposition, a silver medal from the Charleston Exposition, gold medals from the Philadelphia Art Club and the American Art Society. He wrote some five and twenty novels and books of short stories, but more than any fame of these or recognition of his work as an artist or his success as an engineer we are justified in believing that he would prefer to be remembered, if it were possible, for his personal and social qualities. Besides being an artist in the fields described he was an artist also of living.

He died on the seventh day of April, 1915. For nearly seven years after the psalmist's span and limit he had been in looks the kind of middle-aged person that every young athlete hopes to become. To know him was to believe in vikings, crusaders, and cavaliers. Any group into which he came felt an accession of vitality and a quickened circulation. The company he left is conscious of a bereaving loss.