Arts and Letters

Although I had been meeting John Van Dyke for many years in New York at the Authors' Club and at the dinners of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, I had only a vague notion of his origin and his career. I thought of him as a native of New York, an art critic and historian with no especial interest in the West. He first claimed keener interest by the publication of a small volume called The Desert. In this fine book he entered my field. I at once recognized the truth of his observations and the beauty of his interpretations.

When next I met him I asked him how he got his material for this book. "You must have lived on the sand and camped besides the cactus dumps among horned toads and rattlesnakes." He replied, "I did. I went out into that country for the benefit of my health, and to amuse myself, or rather to occupy my time I studied the climate and the fauna and flora of my surroundings."

This led to the discovery that he had lived as a youth in Minnesota at Wabasha on the upper Mississippi River and that he had made studies of the Sioux and other tribes whom I had visited and of whom I had written. In short, so far from being merely the art critic and the librarian of Rutgers College, he was a traveler who had roamed widely in Western America and knew the life and the landscape of many states. No one had written a better book on the desert than his and when he announced a companion monograph called The Sea, I hastened to obtain it. I found in it the same power of description and similar directness of vision.

These two essays, for they are hardly more than essays, won my outspoken admiration and led to a better understanding and a more intimate friendship. Of his controversy concerning the spurious Rembrandts I knew little, although in the Louvre he pointed out to me certain true and false canvases. I knew enough of the sea and its moods to find in his descriptions of wave and sky something of the same vivid pictorial power and much of the essential poetry which had so delighted me in his desert essay.

In his later life he bought a house in Onteora and became my next-door neighbor during the summer and many were the discussions we had on art, war, politics, literature, red men, and pioneers. We dwelt oftenest I think on the beauty of the old-time prairie and gave much time to analyzing the qualities which the wilderness had developed in our fathers. He looked the part of a Western pioneer, for he was of heroic figure, six feet in height and nobly proportioned, graceful and powerful, much the fashion of man I conceive Hawthorne must have been.

Each winter of his later years he left New York and wandered far among "faery islands forlorn" and each spring he brought to us the manuscript records of his travels. The West Indies, the East Indies, Egypt, Java, Sumatra, each of these regions yielded a series of delightful sea-scapes and many colorful sketches of life and character. In truth, he was always the painter in his descriptions. He never blundered with his color and his sense of values was as subtle as it was accurate.

His interest in the Academy was keen and we often conferred on matters concerning its works and membership. His advice was sound and constructive and as an officer in the National Institute of Arts and Letters he was always for action.

I once visited him in his office in Sage Library and at his home which overlooked his boyhood valley, the valley of the Raritan in New Jersey, just to the east of New Brunswick, where he labored for many years. He told me that this valley and the marshes opposite his door had furnished the material for a third monograph called The Meadows. In this old-fashioned dwelling he lived for many years alone with an elderly housekeeper to maintain a certain degree of order in his life but in Onteora he had the companionship of a beloved niece and her understanding husband, Walter Parr of Columbia University.

The painter and the poet were strongly evident in all that he spoke or wrote and the walls of his library could not confine his body, much less his thought. His hunger to know the world increased with years. He loved the good old Earth and he especially loved his home up there on the heights (more than two thousand feet above the Raritan) and often as I passed his gate, I could see him sitting on his porch looking out toward the hills darkening against the sunset. At such times he resembled a gray old eagle who, having flown far over the sea, had come back to rest upon his native crag. His eyes at such times had the look of one who remembers with regret the far away islands of the West. I am sorry that I did not oftener join him on that pleasant porch.