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

Transcribers Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Edward Simmons: in 1893

FROM
SEVEN TO SEVENTY
Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

By Edward Simmons

With an Interruption by

OLIVER HERFORD

FULLY ILLUSTRATED

Publishers

HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

If some curious reader, chancing upon this foreword to the narrative of the life of Edward Simmons, should require my reason for calling it an Interruption instead of an Introduction, I might reply with the obvious evasion that so distinguished a painter as Edward Simmons needs no introduction.

The recipient of medals innumerable, and the most flattering mention in every European capital, surely should need no introduction even in his own country, many of whose public buildings and galleries are enriched by examples of his work in decoration, portraiture, or genre.

But this, as I have said, would be an evasion and not my true reason for calling my preface an interruption, and since the curiosity that can drive a reader to the perusal of matter that is essentially deterrent, wholly superfluous, and probably dull must be of a persistence that will brook no gainsay, I will make a virtue of compulsion and narrate for that readers private enlightenment a story of a very personal nature concerning Mr. Simmons, the telling of which I had rather hoped to avoid.

The story, in so far as it is related to the title of this preface, speaks for itself, and since it bears upon a personal characteristic of the painter, inherited, I am told, from generations of oratorical forebears, a characteristic which also speaks for itself, I must ask the reader to regard it as strictly confidential and to allow it to go no further.

Picture then, Curious Reader, a Boston dinner party at which Mr. Edward Simmons as guest of honor is exercising without let or hindrance the lingual accomplishment bequeathed to him by generations of eloquent forebears, and demonstrating to a fresh audience that the supposed lost art of conversation was not so much lost as cornered.

A dinner party, however, even a Boston dinner party, has in addition to its social and intellectual side a practical, alimentary aspect not to be ignored by anyone, particularly an artist. And since the act of obtaining nourishment employs the function of swallowing, and the function of swallowing cannot be successfully synchronized with that of speech, there were of necessity occasional brief pauses in the flow of oratory.

It was at the moment of one of these unavoidable pauses that a lady (to be remembered, as was the clergyman who interrupted Dr. Johnson, only by her temerity) seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

Now the traffic laws that regulate the respective movements of the human pharynx and larynx are as inexorable as those that govern our public highways, and at the same instant that the lady opened her mouth to speak, the Edwardian larynx resumed its right of way.

Oh, pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I interrupted you, was all she could manage to gasp.

Madam, replied Simmons, with the Chesterfieldian smile the gift of which many an Academician would give all his decorations to possessmadam, no one can speak without interrupting me!

And that is why I have chosen to call my impertinent preface to a narrative which for human interest can (to my thinking) be compared only to that of Benvenuto Cellini, an But pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I am interrupting you!

For years I have wanted to make two cartoonsthe 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 dont stop that there will be trouble!