Arts and Letters

Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860; he died on July 21, 1938. His father, Dr. Owen Jones Wister, was a country practitioner living at Butler Place just outside of Philadelphia and a delightful man, with a sweet personality; his mother was the daughter of Fanny Kemble, one of that notable family of actors, the most gifted that ever was in England and perhaps in Europe. I remember well my first visit to Butler Place, at the end of our freshman year, how, during my first meal, Dr. Wister referred to Admiral X. I said, "I am sorry I have never heard of Admiral X." Dr. Wister replied with a loud guffaw, "He was cashiered from the Navy." "What for, sir?" I asked. More guffawing. "Because he called the Queen of Spain the son of a b-h." (It is evident that the Admiral did not say it with a smile.) I was terribly embarrassed by the expression, and did not know which way to look.

And of Mrs. Kemble, Mrs. Wister's mother, endless stories were told sixty years ago. For instance, she was staying at the village hotel in Lenox, kept by a Yankee, Mr. Curtis. She asked him to take her for a drive. He did so, and began to talk, Yankee fashion, as equal to equal. "Silence, my good man!" she said, in her Lady Macbeth manner, and he shut up. On her bill at the close of the week, after the figures for food and lodging, appeared the item: "Sass, —five dollars. When I takes it, I gets paid for it." Mrs. Kemble was delighted, and the two became fast friends. You see Wister was brought up in a family of marked personality. He was also brought up upon Shakespeare's plays and Walter Scott's novels, perhaps the best of educations to make a civilized gentleman; and Wister did become a highly civilized gentleman of the Eighteenth Century English type. I am aware that this is a contentious term, but Wister was of that type, and they that like it, like it very much.

The tide of Democracy, the legacy of a lawless frontier, the influence of an enfranchised proletariat, the compulsions of universal conformity, with their several enmities to privacy, to reticence, to the old notions of personal rights, cause the mass of our fellow countrymen to decry and deride the type, and, what is worse, render them almost ignorant of it. Owen Wister, in spirit, as I say, belonged to the Eighteenth Century, and sometimes the consequent maladjustments touched his spleen; but, then, in that century, people sometimes were splenetic. Let me go into some particulars.

Wister set great store on the value of tradition, of manners; he liked form, finish, a touch of ceremony. He believed that human intercourse is a matter of art, that, for instance, little delicacies in the mode of coming forward to greet a guest, whether a new acquaintance, or formal company for dinner, or an old friend—the inclination of the head, the outstretching of the arm, the carriage of the body—are matters of importance, never to be slurred over or neglected, unless on purpose; for Wister could be curt, where he deemed curtness appropriate. And when I speak of good manners I do not mean foppery (as you can see by his admiration for the behaviour of his hero, The Virginian), but the sum of little acts and words that show human kindliness, and a wish to make human intercourse a pleasure. I have often thought that among the most charming acts of courtesy I have ever seen was the way in which Wister listened in conversation. You may hear a hundred distinguished men in America talk, and talk interestingly and agreeably, but you will have to go to the hundred and oneth before you will find a courteous listener, one who foregoes his lion's share of the talk. There was something almost histrionic in Wister's carefulness about these matters, and I fancy that he got this from his Kemble ancestors. He always brought to my mind, by some wayward association of ideas, a multifarious Eighteenth Century background, a hall paneled by the Adams, a ceiling painted by Tiepolo, fauteuils by Boulle, a spinet played on by Cimarosa, an armchair with Burke sitting up into the small hours to finish reading Evelina, yes, and a touch of Washington at Valley Forge,—for few know with what dogged courage Wister bore a great private sorrow for many years.

He possessed, too, another Eighteenth Century quality, rationality. He was in religious matters an agnostic; had he actually lived in the Eighteenth Century, he would have been a deist. He liked the reasonable, the understandable, the measured, the orderly. I cannot remember definitely, but I feel sure that he preferred Pope to Shelley; and held a vague notion that romantic people overstepped the limits of propriety in the expression of their sentiments. He had,—he could not escape it, born in a Shakespearian family and bred upon Walter Scott,—a romantic strain, as is so obvious in The Virginian, but he fancied that that was adventitious, and he did not like to have it thought to be a part of his nature. So, too, beneath his agnostic rationalism, lay a strong Christian sentiment. He was ill for near a year before he died, and on his bed in that great New York hospital, that lifts its glassy magnificence to heaven, like choirs of Beauvais Cathedral piled one above another, he talked to a friend about Jesus of Nazareth, and what Jesus meant in this troubled world, and what would happen to everybody, if science with its insistence upon chemical and physical energies should strip away all reverence for Jesus's supernatural conception of the universe. This unexpected lapse from rationalism—I use the old-fashioned terminology; by rationalism I mean the belief that the mind should dominate the emotions—was due largely to St. Paul's school, where he was educated, and to the influence of Dr. Coit.

Wister had, too, what he used to call the healthy Eighteenth Century attitude toward the unseemly facts of life: he enjoyed the "manliness" in Tom Jones, and once, when somebody was deploring the mediaeval humor in Chaucer (which affects the normal civilized being like crossing the Channel in a squall after too many lemon squashes) he said, "Well, you know that of course I revel in it." He had adopted what he considered a rational point of view; man stands on his hind legs, but he is an animal and has animal traits, let us be honest and acknowledge it. He believed that the animal side of man should have its place in literature, but he himself never used words that violated the most strict sense of propriety, and I remember hearing him censure the license in that respect of a distinguished American novelist with some asperity. Certainly, he was far from being a Puritan, he thought the Puritanical attitude towards life wrong. He was a professed Epicurean, in the good, and in what some call the bad, sense of the word. He delighted in beauty, in what, following what I suppose is common usage, I call the nobler pleasures of life, though he would never admit that one pleasure was nobler than another. One pleasure, he maintained, may be more pleasurable than another, more heavily charged with enjoyment, but not more noble. He loved to sit in the Cathedral of Chartres (he always made a pilgrimage there, on every visit to France), and muse before the storied windows, and under the holy arches of the crossing. I remember how he stood silent in the cathedral at Burgos, in the Alhambra, in the Capella Palatina at Palermo, and at Olympia, within the sacred enclosure by the river Alpheus, where under pine trees, mystically musical in the gentle wind, anemones, poppies, and various shy little white Rowers adorn the graveyard of the ancient gods—i dei falsi e bugiardi—and shake his head as if to say how sad that men no longer create such things, and turn to his companions, as men do in church, expressing sympathy by communion without speech, "Yes, this is a holy place." In that temenos thoughts lay too deep for words.

Wister was true to his century, too, in that he did not like the proletariat; he had a vague notion that they should, as the English gentry had thought for hundreds of years, remain in that position of life to which it had pleased God to call them, where they would not interfere with a gentleman's fastidious enjoyment of the good things of life, things, under God's inscrutable Providence, quite beyond proletarian reach. He thought well of persons who shared his theories of values—he preferred men educated at a university, who possessed a smattering of the classics, who knew something about French literature and Italian music, who acknowledged the greatness of Wagner and delighted in Offenbach, who recognized quotations from Shakespeare and were familiar with Prosper Mérimée and Henri Meilhac, whose clothes had an English cut, and were horrified when any children dwelling in the same street chewed gum. But he liked and enjoyed his cowboy friends quite as much as he did those who had been university bred, and he was an admirable "mixer."

As I have said, he was educated, as the phrase is, at St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, and at Harvard College. He graduated with a degree summa cum laude in music, and expected to devote himself to music; he then studied in Paris, had an opportunity to play his own compositions to Franz Liszt, and was encouraged by the master to follow a musical career, but for family reasons he was put to business in Boston. His health suffered, and he went to Wyoming for recuperation; and then entered the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1888. He practised law in Philadelphia for a couple of years, but his real bent was for letters, and through his sojourn in Wyoming (very different in those days from what it is now), the West had touched his imagination and his heart. He filled many little note books with careful records of what he saw and heard, and then set to work upon his tales of cowboys. The Virginian was published in 1902, Lady Baltimore in 1906, The Pentecost of Calamity came out during the Great War, and An Ancient Grudge not long after. He was a lifelong friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and after the latter's death, wrote The Story of a Friendship. His tales of Western life are said to depict, better than any history, various aspects of cowboy life that are now gone forever; and The Virginian, I presume, occupies a secure place on a front shelf in American literature. Philosophy IV and many other tales are delightful. The Pentecost of Calamity was one of the best war books, and An Ancient Grudge useful and timely. His style was clear, fresh, and downright. But Wister did not confine his interests to music, literature, and the West, he was a public-spirited citizen of Philadelphia, and did what he could to improve political conditions in what he considered an imperfect city. The last public episode in his life was to preside over a meeting, called to protest against President Roosevelt's proposal to make changes in the Supreme Court. In order to interfere with this meeting some supporters of the President's proposal obtained a warrant to arrest him on the charge of violating some local statute, but before the warrant was served, he appeared voluntarily before the magistrate, and the charge was set aside, or withdrawn. I forget which.

So he went through life, learning many hard lessons, bearing a great sorrow with calm, reticent manliness, becoming every year more considerate, more genial, urbane, and mellow, diffusing more and more an atmosphere of what the Greeks meant by the qualities of Καλός Κ' αγαθός until he became a very accomplished gentleman and a delightful friend.