WILLIAM WETMORE STORY.*
THE names of William Story and Henry James form an agreeable literary conjunction, and the book before us is pleasant and distinguished, demanding a good deal of its readers, it must be added, in the way of a special attitude of mind. This implies what is the fact,—that it appeals rather to the admirers of Mr. Henry James than to the ordinary reader. This last person might conceivably be frightened, if not driven away, by the first twenty pages or so, in which Mr. James, in those delicate, complicated, long-drawn-out sentences of his, full of words most carefully and exquisitely chosen, of "curiosities and felicities," explains the point of view from which he regards his subject. One need hardly say that the slight intellectual effort needed to place ourselves at the same point of view is well worth making. The English public, as a whole, knows too little of the author of Roba di Roma; yet we suppose the book was nowhere more highly appreciated than in England. Also, it was left for England to encourage the sculptor and justify him to himself by the enthusiasm shown in 1862 for his remarkable statues, the Cleopatra and the Libyan SibyL Story was a, man made to take England captive, as well by his romantic talent as by his delightful character. Probably he was in all ways the most attractive of the Americans who during the nineteenth century made Europe their home.
The book is not strictly a biography of William Story, and Mr. James makes this clear from the beginning. His plan is a wider one. He desires in some way or other to com- memorate all those, the eclaireurs, the " precursors," who led the way and taught America to enjoy the Old World. His imagination is well fitted to take him and us back to the days of a half-discovered Italy, of cheap and dangerous travelling, romantic adventure, the study of art in all the wonderful freshness of an earlier time. Rome during the siege of 1849, Florence under the Grand Dukes, each of a hundred cities with its own marvellous interest, hard to reach, risky to live in,—those who remember all this are fast becoming a small company, and modern travellers can never know the Italy of Keats and Shelley, hardly of the Brownings, of Landor, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Cushman, Hans Andersen, William Story. Mr. James found it an attractive idea to linger in that old Italy, especially with the Americans who, from the artistic and literary point of view, conquered so much for themselves there, and he has made William Story the chief type and central figure of his picture, which is crowded with many " shades," more or less distinctly drawn. The idea was a pretty one ; but the effect of the finished work is not quite perhaps what Mr. James intended it to be. His way of working, with so many small strokes and delicate touches, with nuances innumerable, vague suggestions, complicated phrases, is hardly suited for biographical study of any kind. He can only treat his subject by wandering round and round it, working it up, as it were, from its background ; and the consequence of the treatment seems to us to be, in this case, that the individuality of the artist is more evident than that of the model. This is partly because Mr. James gives his public credit for knowing a good deal more about Story than they do. Many people, reading these volumes, will find themselves in the middle of the second before they gain any clear idea of Story's personality. He may be, probably is, a more familiar figure in America; but the book appeals to England, as Story himself did,—success- fully, but not so far as to become a household word like one of her own writers or artists of equal distinction.
Story's art struggles and his friendships were the chief matters of interest in his life; these, we think, with his charming character and delightful literary taste, deserved a fuller record than they have here. Still, the book tells a • William Wetmore Story and his Friends: _front Letters, Diaries, and Recol- lections. By Henry James. 2 vols. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [24e. net.]
careful reader a great deal, if he will patiently accept and study Mr. Henry James's way of putting things. We read with pleasure of the brilliant young lawyer, the Judge's son-
tl e f idler a man of remarkable distinction in his own way— making his first fame by writing law-books : Story on Con-
tracts, Story on Sales of Personal Property, and so forth. His love of art, however, was so well known that on his father's death he was requested to make a public monument and statue in memory of him. He travelled to Rome in search of the necessary knowledge and inspiration, returned, fulfilled his task to admiration, then found that be had left his heart behind him ; that art in Italy, not law in America, must be his career ; and started with his young wife on a series of long visits to Europe, ending in his final establishment in Rome in the apartment of the Barberini Palace which became his winter home for the rest of his days.
This Italian life was very happy, though the early part of it was clouded by grief—the eldest boy died at six years old, a sorrow never to be forgotten—and though Story's art was long a disappointment to him, a rather hopeless struggle, though an absorbing enthusiasm, up to his English Exhibi- tion triumph. After that he had no difficulty in finding purchasers for his statues, characteristic, romantic works of art which hit the taste of the time,—a time which demanded both in painting and sculpture the literary touch which was Story's peculiar talent and delight. All the work he ever did, both in sculpture and in literature, has this special touch, which gives it a charm quite its own, a charm frequently not reached by higher genius. Among his books, in our opinion, Roba di Roma takes easily the first place. Now, as ever, it is perfectly fascinating. Much of the Roman life it pictures is of course of the past, and can never be seen by our eyes : yet Rome has an atmosphere it never loses, and in all great essentials it is the same as when Story looked out of his high windows over the wilderness of brown roofs and yellow towers, or listened to the splash of the fountains and the bleating of the goats, or walked in the Campagna with its carpet of many coloured flowers. Roba di Roma and Transformation carry away the palm among books on Rome : it is a feather in America's cap, and seems to justify all that Mr. Henry James says about her pioneers in Italy. We should like to quote a few lines from Mr. James's remarks on Roba di Roma, in the hope, which he also expresses, of sending our readers back to its pages :—
" In my own case I retain a memory so fond and grateful that I perhaps scarce can speak of • Robe di Roma' with proper detachment. The golden air, as I look over its pages, makes a mist ; I read them again in the light of old personal perceptions and emotions; I read, as we say, too much into them, too many associations, pictures, other ineffaceable passages. I remember perfectly the consuming envy kindled, on my part, at first, by the sense of an impregnation with the subject at which it seemed to me 1 could never hope to arrive, and at which the writer must have arrived by all sorts of delightful steps and contacts, any quantity of exquisite experience I used to think, I remember, that the great challenge to envy was in the little evoked visions of that out-of-the-season Rome to which one had one's self to be a stranger, the Rome of the Romans only, of the picture-making populace, both in the city and the small hill- towns, who lead their lives as the sun gets low on the long summer days and the clear shade spreads like a tent above the narrow, sociable streets. To read these passages over is to taste and feel again the very air of early rambles, when one was always agaze ; to hear the sounds, to smell the dust, to give one's self up once more as to the thing that was ancient and noble even when homely or sordid, the thing that might be mean but that yet couldn't be vulgar, the thing condemned, in spite of itself, in spite of weakness or ugliness or other offence, to be mysteriously interesting."
We must not leave without special mention the many interesting personalities, the friends and correspondents, both English and American, who are grouped in these two volumes round Story and his wife,—Sumner, Lowell, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Landor in his sad old age, Robert Lord Lytton, Lady William Russell, and other less known names, such as Frank Boott, Frank Heath, John Field. A certain fresh air of simplicity and kindness, the true artist nature, seems specially to breathe round William and Emelyn Story. Never had man or artist a truer helpmeet than she was to him, and there are few more touching incidents in his life than the employment of the eighteen months during which he survived her. He spent those last days—after her loss had given him his death-blow—in making the beautiful monument which stands to their memory where they both sleep, in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.
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