Arts and Letters

Henry Dwight Sedgwick became a member of the Academy in 1933. By no means retired from the world, he died last spring at the age of ninety-five. Although born in New York, he really belonged to Massachusetts. He was a member of a family that was known for seven generations as the Sedgwicks of Stockbridge. Ellery Sedgwick was his younger brother; the novelist Anne Douglas Sedgwick was one of his cousins, and his grandfather's sister was Catherine Maria Sedgwick, the once famous contemporary of Fenimore Cooper.

Dying only five years short of one hundred, Sedgwick had naturally a very long memory. In his boyhood, his family went to the Unitarian Church near Gramercy Park. The venerable Peter Cooper, who occupied the pew in front of the Sedgwicks, rested his old bones on a circular blown-up rubber cushion. During the long sermons of Dr. Bellows, Sedgwick's brother Theodore spent his time trying to open the valve of the air cushion, while he watched the old gentleman's increasing discomfort as his bones gradually settled on the wooden bench. It came over Sedgwick, during these sermons, that he did not like the Unitarian faith of his fathers, and he was equally repelled by the Presbyterian faith which he saw exemplified in Count Albinola. This old Italian gentleman was the last survivor of the once celebrated and romantic Milanese exiles, the rebels against the Austrian rule of their Italian motherland who had been imprisoned in the infamous Spielberg. The Sedgwicks had befriended the exiles a century or more ago, and one and all had studied Italian with them; and the ancient Count Albinola still lived in New York, supporting himself by importing Leghorn hats. Sedgwick, as a little boy taken to call upon him, remembered the old gentleman sitting in his house with a sad face and hopeless eyes and with his hands folded in his lap. His expression and posture reminded the boy of the opening cantos of Dante's Inferno. Count Albinola had become a Calvinist of the straitest sect.

These two incidents illustrate not only the length of Sedgwick's memory but certain other characteristics also. Averse to the Presbyterian faith as well as the Unitarian he came to share the feeling of Henri Quatre. If one had to choose, he preferred the Catholics to the Huguenots, and he became an Epicurean, one who upheld the contention that the object of living is to obtain all possible personal good. It did not escape his attention that all manner of decent folk condemned this eudemonistic egoism. Christians, Stoics, and men of science suspected it alike, and Dante put Epicurus and his followers in hell; but Sedgwick defended the doctrine stoutly not only in his Memoirs but in his book The Art of Happiness as well, and in his life of Horace, which might have convinced anyone of the merits of the philosophy of Epicurus. For what can be said against the Epicurean virtues, health, frugality, privacy, culture, and friendship? To these one might add the pleasures of the garden. Epicurus had chosen a garden as the place for teaching, and Sedgwick recurs in many of his books to the delights of gardening and the cultivation of vegetables along with flowers.

Sedgwick's recollection of Count Albinola brings up a further trait, his lifelong love of Italy and its history and culture. "I was Latin at heart," he says somewhere, and he added elsewhere that he had never been drawn to England as he was to Italy, Spain, and France. After fifteen years of the practice of law, in which he felt uncomfortable—“as if I were swimming in glue," he remarked in his Memoirs—he betook himself year after year to one or another of the Latin countries, regarding which he wrote many books. In his little Ford he wandered on the French roads in May and June, often with Owen Wister, our fellow-member. Some of his books were grave—the life of Ignatius Loyola, for one; others were light—the life of Alfred de Musset and the study of Madame Récamier; while Italy in the Thirteenth Century was his great work, flanked by a Short History of Italy and a handbook of Dante. He composed partly in Rome the long and serious historical work that he continued in the National Library in Paris; then, living in Cambridge for several years, he made himself at home in a cubicle of the Library of Harvard College. Some of the professors browsing in the stacks reminded him of monks of the Middle Ages, and it may have been this that suggested to him Pro Vita Monastica, a sympathetic book of essays on the monastic life. Or, one might rather say, on the contemplative virtues that, for him, were also Epicurean. Studying again the Greek and Latin that he had largely forgotten, he expounded the ancient art of meditation, and he wrote his Marcus Aurelius at this time.

Sedgwick liked to call himself a "Grub Street dilettante," and he prophesied a moment when the Epicurean of letters would come into his own. For the dilettanti, he thought, were more human than the scholars. He was suspicious of the so-called "factual" professors, whom he described as "servants to the Genii of Archives," saying he was less concerned with what Dante meant in his own time than with what he meant to a New Yorker of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "I write only for pleasure," he said, and "I have done no chores. I have boarded one subject or another as fancy dictated," adding, "I have had few readers but lots of fun." Yet, writing in the spirit of Montaigne, this very accomplished man of letters produced in the end a formidable body of work. Nor, with all his distaste for pedantry, was it ever slipshod. Sedgwick was a rare case of what has been called the amateur spirit, that has triumphed more often in English than American letters; and he will be remembered personally as one who remained to the day of his death courteous, gay, serene, and gallant.