From Seven to Seventy. Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

Introduction

A Yankee Heritage

For years I have wanted to make two cartoons—the first, dated 1800, to be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, “New England with Her Child America.” In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England, is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to grab the reins. He yells:

“Ma, if you don’t stop that there will be trouble!”

I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years, until, without his mother’s realizing it, he has slipped quietly from home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is still the young mother of the cartoon.

My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who embarked upon the Mayflower in search of a far-off land where they might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have never been able to find that this pure 

xiv

English lineage had been broken during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for centuries before that in the old country.

From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred of kings; a lack of rhythm—the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred of restraint in any form.

From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of my birth: “I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke Webster.”

My father died before I was old enough to know him, but I got quite a vivid picture of his side of the family from a distant relative whom I met by accident one day. He said: “The Simmonses have always been a long-legged set of lazy galoots. We have had great success with the other sex. We have been able to do one thing a little better than other folks and stick to it until we have about a thousand dollars—then we sit down and loaf until it is gone.”

Mother was different. When she was a girl she had 

xv

a serious talk with her dad, telling him it was foolish for her to study piano or music of any kind.

“What is your ambition?” he asked.

“To scrub a kitchen floor better than anyone else,” she replied; and he succumbed, his New England nature realizing that, after all, it might be well to have one practical person in the family. Mother’s thrifty streak came in very useful, for a young widow with four lusty children to feed did not have an easy time in those days. The sun never rose upon her asleep and her small economies were ever her own pride and the butt of our selfish derision. After her day’s work was over, it was my delight—little brute that I was—to lie in bed and listen to her voice, reading to me from some story of delicious adventure. When her head drooped and the book fell from her hands, I, still wide awake, would whine and finally yell, until she pulled herself together and went on. Mother’s day was an endless round of doing something for others.

From the land where these first American ancestors of mine settled so long ago, I get the shape of my body and the contour of my face. I look more like an Iroquois Indian than an Englishman. Some historian has remarked that the change in the Yankee is due to intermarriage with the redskins. Imagine the spectacle of a staid Governor Bradford wedded to an Indian squaw! Two hundred years of the same climate, the same food, and the same life produced the same type, that’s all.