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Some
Portraits Of Early Ideas Leonard
Feeney, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1941) III. DESIGN FOR A GRECIAN URN To Give
my father credit, when he found he had some children on his hands, he decided
to go out and do something about it in the matter of finances. Having
carefully analyzed the likes and dislikes of his children (we were ultimately
three boys and one girl), partially by listening to their prattle, partially
by receiving reports thereon from the neighbors, he made up his mind that we
needed luxuries to go with our fantastic imaginations, and he was determined
to supply them. Perhaps
one of the reasons why I could never rouse myself to a Communist’s rage
against what has been lately called the Capitalistic System, or the
Republican Rule, is because it was possible under such a system or rule for a
poor boy with energy and ability to rise from a state of poverty to one of
practical comfort bordering on wealth. My
father gave up working in a shoe factory and joined the forces of a life
insurance company. In no time he was raised from the status of agent to that
of assistant manager, and thence to the post of manager and given the running
of a large office with five or six stenographers and more than forty men
under him. In a single season he produced more business for his company than
any other manager in the United States and Canada. He was invited to New York
to attend a great banquet, and sat next to the President of the Company. I
always feel very proud of my father on that occasion, sitting next to the
President, wearing the light blue tie my mother had given him, instead of the
stiff black one of formal dress, and letting the officers of the largest life
insurance company in the world know that it isn’t decoration that makes the hero.
I learned from other sources that my father impressed all present on that
occasion, for he had youth and considerable charm. My
father had great shrewdness in business. Life insurance, at the time when my
father was making his company famous, was suspect in many quarters. It seemed
to many like a silly investment of money in case you didn’t die quickly and
cash in on the investment. I once heard my father say to a man who was
abusing the notion of life insurance in general: “What are you talking about?
You couldn’t get any life insurance, anyhow!” “Why
not?” said the man. “Because
you have cirrhosis of the liver. No company would take you.” This
worried the man, and he called on my father a few days later to see if my
father had meant what he said. “Well,
let us go over to our medical examiner and have him look you over and see,”
said my father, and they both went. The
medical examiner found the man’s liver in excellent condition, and this so
pleased the man that he let my father write him up for a ten thousand dollar
policy. The man insisted that the joke was on my father. He slapped my father
on the back and shouted: “You see! You were wrong!” And, of course, my father
had to admit that he was. My
father, when addressing his agents in their weekly meeting, told of this
incident, and reminded them that it was a good idea at times to give people
the impression that they can’t get a thing, so as to make them want it all
the more. At
the next meeting of the office force, one of my father’s agents came in with
a black eye. “Where
did you get that eye?” my father asked him. “From
putting your business principles into practice,” said the agent; “I told a
man who said he didn’t believe in insurance that he couldn’t get any because
he was sick. And he said: ‘Oh, I am, am I?’” When
my father’s income reached the stage where it supplied him with a
satisfactory bank account, he undertook to supply his children (a) with the
best of educations, and that in a Sisters’ school where each of us was
exposed for nine years to the lovely radiance and elegant manners of Catholic
nuns; (b) with a training in music; I was apprenticed to the violin which
twisted my neck and gave me astigmatism; my second brother was assigned to
the clarinet, which nearly blew out his ears; my sister took up singing, and
sings beautifully to this day; while my youngest brother espoused the piano,
and has since forgotten all he learned; (c) with the best of vacations in the
summer time. Being
sea urchins, practically born on the beach, my father thought it nice for us
to spend our vacations in the country. He secured a boarding house for us,
which was almost a hotel, in the New Hampshire hills, not far from the foot
of Mt. Kearsage, and equidistant from the shores of Lake Sunapee. Thither we
excursioned for at least three weeks each summer so as to see how good it was
to be away from the ocean, and so as to appreciate it better on our return. Our
host and hostess were twangy New Hampshire farmers who specialized in
home-like courtesy and good food. Their conversation was full of that rustic
wisdom and native wit which needs to be savored in actual experience to know
how delicious it can be. We enjoyed these vacations, but I remember them
particularly by reason of a little girl who stayed one summer at our inn, a
little girl whose name I never learned and never shall, but who enchanted me
while listening to her half hour of practice on the piano every morning at
nine. She began with fifteen minutes of scales, and ended with fifteen
minutes of attempted Chopin. Maybe it was Madame Chaminade who was the
composer, but I think it was Chopin, in one of the Preludes. I was as
faithful in attending these practice sessions as the little girl was. I knew
exactly when she was to begin. There was a circular staircase descending from
the second floor to the music room. And every morning found me seated on the
stairs, listening to her while she played. There
is a moment in Art (and in Life, too, where it approximates the ideal state
of Art) which may be variously described as the inchoative moment, the moment
of poise or suspense, the moment of the sustained instant. It is the artist’s
brave, hopeless attempt to fix the present, by denying it a future, so as to
refuse it a past. Lessing speaks in his Laocoön of “the extended
stationary object” required for a painting, that supreme moment of magic when
all the figures are poised for action. Picasso said to Gertrude Stein after
he had painted her portrait, “It doesn’t look like you, Gertrude, but it
will!” The peasants in Millet’s Angelus are always on the point of
making the Sign of the Cross. Cellini’s Head of Perseus is always about
to drip blood. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is forever on the verge of
smiling. Were La Gioconda ever once to open her lips and laugh, that, my
dears, would be the end of art! . . . What I speak of is also the
theme of a poem, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the heifers and the
maids with garlands are always going to the fair. I
once read a story about a rich family who had erected on their estate a
beautiful sunken garden and filled it with objects of art. There was a stone
hound, about to run in the chase. There was a stone archer, about to shoot a
bow. There was a stone lady, about to eat a bunch of grapes. The rich family
exhibited the garden once — that, in a large week-end party to their friends
— and then went off to Europe and left it. In their absence they made no
provision for the care of the garden. The fountain dried up. The flowers in
the urns decayed. The benches were overgrown with weeds. And the statuaries
became covered with cobwebs. These granite beauties, angered at being so
disregarded, held a conspiracy one moonlight night. They resolved to undo
themselves as objects of art. The lady ate the grapes. The archer shot the
bow. The dog ran away. Thus did they avenge themselves on the unappreciative
rich family who owned them. It
was such a moment of sustained suspense that existed between me and the
little girl who played the piano in the summer boarding-house near Lake
Sunapee. Precisely at nine o’clock each morning I would come and sit on the
stairs (the seventh step from the top, if I remember) and resting my elbows
on my knees and my chin in my hands, would listen for the half hour of her practice.
Precisely at nine o’clock she would enter the guests’ parlor, and twirling
the piano stool till she could both sit on it and touch her toes to the
floor, and suitably arranging herself in other ways, would begin her scales,
to be followed by the incipient phrases of the Chopin Prelude. Not for all
the kingdoms of the world would she turn her head to look at me. Not for all
the kingdoms of the world would I descend one further step on the stairs. She
knew that I was listening to her, and I knew that she knew it. And she knew
that I knew that she knew. It was a perfect collaboration in a perfect ruse
between two strange children, too shy to be playmates, too immature to be
lovers, too young to be disillusioned, too old to be deceived. We
both knew that it was part of the requirement for preserving this haunting
half hour that we should be inconspicuous to each other for the rest of the
day. I never knew where she went when her lesson was over. She never saw me
except at mealtimes. I never spoke to her. Neither learned the other’s name.
At the end of a fortnight she departed with her parents to mix with the
mælstrom of common life and be carried on in its relentless tide. We never
met again. But
she has lingered with me always in the manner of a dream and often returns to
me as a symbol. Whenever I have been seated in a theatre and the house lights
were lowered and the curtain about to rise; whenever I have watched a
symphony conductor raise his baton for the first down-beat that will release
a great splurge of music; when I have stood on the threshold of the Pitti
Palace about to gaze at the wonders, or shaded my eyes to enter the
cathedrals of Milan and Cologne, or peered for the first time from the
balcony of the Hotel des Invalides, to catch a glimpse of the little casket
of Napoleon; at every pent-up moment of my life when I have waited for some
artistic surprise to flash before my senses, there has come back to me the
vision of a little girl in the hills of New Hampshire about to strike her
first chord on the piano during that fortnight of magical summer mornings, at
the precise hour of nine, when she was contemplatively mine. What
became of her, I do not know. I doubt not that life has dealt roughly with
her, as it does with all precious things. But I like to think that I am
unforgotten in her memories as she is in mine, and that amidst the stale
platitudes that serve her for comfort in the fatigues and yawns of middle
age, one bright picture lingers with her still: that of a boy who was content
to admire her for her music, and sat like a sculpture and listened like a
painting, at a point on the staircase that was half way down the stairs. |