A Forgotten Tale by Arthur Conan Doyle!

Pardon the clickbait title, but I couldn’t resist after yesterday’s “news” that a “lost” Sherlock Holmes story “by” Arthur Conan Doyle had come to light. Fortunately, last night, Mattias Boström, a bona fide Doyle scholar, wrote an article which dismantled the hastily made claims. (Before being eclipsed by Howard Pyle, Doyle and Holmes were the objects of my obsession, and I still dip into their worlds from time to time.)

Now, about “A Forgotten Tale” by Arthur Conan Doyle...

It was a poem, not a tale per se, and it has no Sherlockian content. Evidently, Dr. Doyle (as he was often referred to, then) wrote it not long before he visited the United States for the first time, in 1894. In fact, the manuscript of “A Forgotten Tale” seems to have sailed from England just a few weeks - or even days - before the doctor himself did: Scribner’s Magazine accepted it on September 27, 1894, and Doyle arrived in New York on October 2nd. As the poem was scheduled to appear in the January 1895 issue (which would be on the newsstands by mid-December), Scribner’s must have commissioned Howard Pyle to illustrate it almost immediately.

I assume Edward L. Burlingame, editor of Scribner’s Magazine, communicated by letter or in person with Doyle about the poem - and possibly its illustrations. He may even have put Doyle in touch with Pyle, seeing as he had done just that with Rudyard Kipling regarding Pyle’s illustrations for “McAndrews’ Hymn” [sic] - soon to be printed in the December 1894 Scribner’s. Then again, Kipling had asked outright “if you could kindly place me in communication with your artist as it is possible that he might see his way to using some of my suggestions.” But Doyle may not have cared as much, or at all, about the pictures for “A Forgotten Tale”.

And, unfortunately, there’s no paper trail to answer that question. I hunted extensively through the Scribner Archives at Princeton and found nothing. Equally frustrating is that, when Doyle arrived, Pyle may very well have been in the midst of - or had recently finished - illustrating Doyle’s “The Parasite” for Harper’s Weekly, which was to appear in four installments (and in book form) while Doyle was in the United States! There, too, however, I have yet to find any correspondence between Doyle and Pyle or Harper & Brothers concerning the project.

What’s also maddening is that, during his travels, Doyle met “Howells, Cable, Eugene Field, Garland, Riley” - all of whom Pyle had met, and some of whom he knew very well - and was feted again and again by folks in Pyle’s social or professional circles. And, lo and behold, Doyle and Pyle were even in Philadelphia on the same day! Saturday, November 10, 1894, found Pyle lecturing at the Drexel Institute that afternoon and Doyle lecturing that evening - but, again, who knows if they encountered each other, or if Pyle attended the Doyle event?

And later, after Doyle spent Thanksgiving with Kipling in Vermont, he wrote to his mother, “Have you read his poem, McAndrews Hymn, in Scribner’s Xmas number. It’s grand!” But God forbid he should say anything about Pyle’s illustrations. Pyle, meanwhile, must have written down something about Doyle’s writings, but so far nothing has surfaced. I’ll keep looking.

My frustrations aside...

If Scribner’s Magazine accepted “A Forgotten Tale” on September 27, 1894, they probably didn’t get Pyle on board for upwards of a week or more. And as the printed magazine would need to be out in mid-December (and factoring in time before that to prepare photo-engraved plates of the illustrations), it’s safe to say that Pyle made his drawings sometime between mid-October and late November 1894 - all the while Doyle was travelling across the United States.

I have to admit that I’ve never been overly fond of Pyle’s “A Forgotten Tale” pictures. The first one feels too Daniel Vierge-like: but Pyle may have deliberately tried to inject some “Spanish” flavor into it, since the poem is set in Mediaeval Spain. And the second drawing is somewhat hampered by the backlighting. Then again, Pyle’s pen-work was in a sort of transitional phase, and he may have done these in a hurry: he was his usual busy self, writing and illustrating, and he had also just started teaching. His original pen-and-inks haven’t turned up, by the way, nor have his oil paintings for “The Parasite”. Somehow I’m not surprised.

Anyway, after two exhausting months, Doyle sailed off on December 8, 1894. I assume Scribner’s Magazine for January 1895 was still in production at the time, but surely Doyle saw a copy of the finished product (either the American or British edition) not long after he returned home.

Incidentally, Doyle’s departure date conflicted with the Authors’ Reception at the Juvenile Order of the Round Table in New York, to which he had been invited. And who was also invited and - reportedly - attended? Howard Pyle. Of course.

In the end, since Doyle didn’t return to the States until 1914 and since Pyle didn’t go to Europe until 1910-11 - and stayed almost entirely in Italy (where Doyle wasn’t) - they never met again, if they ever met in the first place.

However, the Sherlockian in me takes some solace in the fact that while a sickly Pyle was recuperating in a Rome hotel room in December 1910, his secretary noted how he “was soon absorbed in the Strand Magazine” - the Christmas issue of which featured “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

A FORGOTTEN TALE
by Arthur Conan Doyle

There still remains in one of the valleys of the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain a small hill called “Colla de los Inglesos.” It marks the spot where three hundred bowmen of the Black Prince’s army were surrounded by several thousand Spanish cavalry, and after a long and gallant resistance, were entirely destroyed.


Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw my brindled heifer there,
A trail of bowmen, spent and bare
A little man on a roan mare
And a tattered flag before them.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my lambing ewe,
And an army riding through,
Thick and brave the pennons flew
From the lance-heads o’er them.”

Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw beside the milking byre,
White with want and black with mire,
A little man with face afire
Marshalling his bowmen.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my bullocks twain
And the hardy men of Spain
With bloody heel and slackened rein,
Closing on their foemen.”

Nay, but there is more to tell,
Garcia, the herdsman.
“More I might not bide to view,
I had other things to do,
Tending on the lambing ewe,
Down among the clover.”

Prithee tell me what you heard,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Shouting from the mountain side,
Shouting until eventide,
But it dwindled and it died
Ere milking time was over.”

Ah, but saw you nothing more,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Yes, I saw them lying there,
The little man and roan mare,
And in their ranks the bowmen bare
With their staves before them.”

And the hardy men of Spain,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Hush, but we are Spanish too,
More I may not say to you,
May God’s benison, like dew,
Gently settle o’er them.”

“No American Writer Can Come Within Touch of You”

Howard Pyle’s fondness for the writings of William Dean Howells is well documented - mostly in Pyle’s own correspondence. On October 30, 1895, Pyle wrote yet another glowing letter to his literary idol, mentor, and friend:

My wife and I are reading your Shaker story together. I was so much impressed with the first number that I sat down immediately and wrote Harry Harper what I so strongly felt - that it only added to my already formed opinion that no American writer can come within touch of you. The measure of your success lies far beyond the radius of the present into the vaster cycle of the future....

The first number of your story was startlingly true to nature, the succeeding numbers are charmingly idyllic.

“Your Shaker story” was “The Day of Their Wedding” which appeared in seven weekly installments (or “numbers”) in Harper’s Bazar between October 5 and November 16, 1895. And “Harry Harper” was J. Henry Harper, a friend of both Howells and Pyle, and a member of the publishing firm.

Pyle had, in fact, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter of February 26 that same year: “I do not of course know what are your present rewards of popularity but I feel very sure that you are writing for future readers.” Over the past century, however, Howells’ stock hasn’t performed quite as well as Pyle thought it would.

But now, future readers, why not read the novel yourselves and put Pyle’s assessment to the test?

Howard Pyle’s Werewolf

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896

Werewolf? There wolf. (There - no, there, in the middle foreground of the picture - just squint a little and you’ll see it.)

Yes, who knew that Howard Pyle had painted one? But so he did, to illustrate “The Werewolf” by the Chicago poet and humorist Eugene Field, who perhaps is best remembered for “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Duel” (also known as “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat”).

Pyle met Field at least once, at a dinner honoring Thomas Bailey Aldrich at The Aldine Club in New York on March 24, 1893, where the other guests included James Whitcomb Riley, Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and William Dean Howells - all of whom had made significant contributions to the “juvenile literature” of the period. Whether they had met before or after or regularly corresponded, I don’t yet know, but on November 3, 1895, Pyle inscribed a copy of his newly-published novel, The Garden Behind the Moon, “To Eugene Field, My fellow worker in the world of Art” and added (in his confusingly hifalutin way):

For as the spoken word is like a breath of wind that maybe stirs the world around to agitation that soon is still again, so is the written word like a stone of rock cut out from the bosom of humanity, to endure for generations and for ages.

And as a pebble cast into the sea shall cause a movement to be felt in the uttermost parts of the waters for ever, so shall our work, cast into the bosom of futurity cause its motive to be felt to the furthermost ebb and flood of Eternity.

How great then, O! brother, our endeavour for good and for truth.

Inscription from Howard Pyle to Eugene Field, November 3, 1895 (via Bonhams)

But Field never read this: the day after Pyle inscribed the book, Field suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 45. Shocked, Pyle sent both the book and a letter “expressing his deep sympathies and fond memories” to the Field’s widow on November 10th. “That you appreciated his lofty aims[,] his nobility of thought[,] his humane efforts and the success that crowned them is shown in your words,” wrote Mrs. Field later that month, and she assured Pyle “of a lasting place in my thoughts for Gene’s sake” and called The Garden Behind the Moon “a story after my own heart.”

Then came “The Werewolf.” According to a syndicated news item, Field had been writing and rewriting the story since 1884:

His last revision pleased him and he decided to print it. But death came too suddenly, and the story was found, unpublished, among his effects. Mrs. Field, concluding to have the story appear, gave it to the editor of The Ladies Home Journal, in which magazine all of Mr. Field’s work, outside of his newspaper articles, was presented to the public.

And of course it needed to be illustrated. An article in the January 3, 1943, edition of The Sunday Morning Star of Wilmington, Delaware, quoted “a Wilmington man” who had been an associate editor of the The Ladies’ Home Journal and who recalled his 1895 visit to Pyle:

It is remembered that Mr. Pyle’s working quarters were crowded with costumes, guns and ships of the Revolutionary era. I was advised that Mr. Pyle was always busy, and it was a difficult assignment for the youthful editor of a magazine. However, the artist consented to make the picture after learning that it was to illustrate the last literary work of the Chicago poet and humorist. Mr. Pyle admitted that he was an admirer of Field, and inasmuch as the story suggested just the type of drawing that he had been anxious to make he accepted the commission and was authorized to write his own check.

The illustration was for “The Werewolf” and it was believed that it represented the best work of Mr. Pyle as well as the best story by the author of “Little Boy Blue,” and it was so regarded by admirers of both artistic and author. The illustration was lauded greatly, for Mr. Pyle had drawn the ghost of a snarling wolf, fitting the text admirably.

The fee is not known, but it included publication rights and “The Werewolf” painting itself. And Pyle must have painted it sometime between mid- or late November 1895 and January 1896, since by February it was on display in Chicago in a travelling exhibition of illustrations made for the Journal. In a review of the show, the Inter Ocean of Sunday, February 1, 1896, called Pyle’s painting “a weird, uncanny-looking thing, possessing strange fascination.” The next day, the same paper noted:

In this work Mr. Pyle experimented using red and black oils on canvas. The result is something weird and fascinating. In the foreground is the fabled monster, the “were-wolf,” a horrible creature dimly outlined; in the background is a party of pleasure-seekers, terror-stricken, fleeing for their lives. The scene is laid in a dark and dreary wood.

That same day, the Chicago Tribune said:

A striking picture in oil by Howard Pyle to illustrate “The Werewolf,” an unpublished tale by Eugene Field, is the strongest thing in the collection. Indeed, it is said Pyle himself regards it as the best work he has ever done.

It was admired by other attendees of the exhibit as well, including members of Field’s family. On February 27, 1896, his sister-in-law Henrietta Dexter Field wrote Pyle “to express the admiration and deep appreciation both my husband, Roswell Field, and myself have for the beautiful illustration you designed for ‘The Werewolf’”:

We saw the painting at “The Ladies Home Journal” exhibition of pictures here and were more than gratified that the public seemed to appreciate its beauties, as there were always crowds standing before it. If Eugene were here I feel sure that he would be more than pleased that you caught his idea so beautifully, and he doubtless would write you words of appreciation more suitable than these, whose only merit lies in the expression of the love of a sorrowing brother and sister.

The Chicago exhibition slightly pre-dated the publication of the picture in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896, where - in a halftone plate engraved by Albert Munford Lindsay (who, I might add, attended some of Pyle’s illustration classes at the Drexel Institute and visited Pyle at his home at about this time) - it was wordily titled, “The werewolf skulked for a moment in the shadow of the yews, and Yseult plucked old Siegfried’s spear from her girdle.” Echoing the Inter Ocean, The New York Times of March 11, 1896, called it “a weird drawing...that is mystic and suggestive while thoroughly original.”

And, indeed, Pyle liked it enough to borrow it back from the publisher for his one-man shows at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1897. The following year it was exhibited in Washington, D.C. - and perhaps elsewhere - again under the auspices of the The Ladies’ Home Journal. The Curtis Publishing Company (publisher of Journal) also issued it as a 12 x 15" print around the same time.

But then a fog rolls into the painting’s history: the anonymous associate editor quoted above also said, “It was long carefully displayed in the editor’s office” - and I assume, here, he was referring to editor-in-chief Edward W. Bok - “but [then it] mysteriously disappeared, and all attempts to relocate it have failed.”

Somehow, however, it wound up in the possession of Charles William Hargens, Jr. (1893-1997) and his wife Marjorie Allen (Garman) Hargens (1895-1978), illustrators both, who lived for many years in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And then it went to their son, engineer Charles William Hargens III (1918-2013), and then to his estate.

And now it’s for sale: Freeman’s will auction the painting in Philadelphia on June 8, 2014. The estimate is $8,000-12,000. I consider that to be conservative, considering its size - 18 x 24 inches - and relative importance - but we’ll soon find out!

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle (via Freeman’s)

Testimonials to Howard Pyle

In honor of Howard Pyle’s 161st birthday, here are a few kind words from some of his friends and admirers:

“You write about a beautiful sheet in the Graphic by Howard Pyle. If you mean a composition that reminds one of Terborch or Nicolaas Keyzer - ‘Penn and the Colonists’ - yes, I was struck by it too, so much so that I have ordered the issue. Yes, it is a damned fine thing.” (Vincent Van Gogh to Anthon Ridder van Rappard, c.May 9, 1883)

“It was not so much the actual things he taught us as contact with his personality that really counted. Somehow after a talk with him you felt inspired to go out and do great things, and wondered afterwards by what magic he did it” (Maxfield Parrish to Richard Wayne Lykes, March 28, 1945)

“I haven’t before had a chance to express to you my very heart felt admiration for your noble series of illustrations for my ‘Washington.’ They dignify and illuminate the work in every way.” (Woodrow Wilson to Howard Pyle, October 27, 1896)

“The virility and poetry and the beauty of it are remarkable” (Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Howard Pyle, June 20, 1902)

“It was a great idea, a fortunate idea, to re-write the Round Table Tales, & I am your grateful servant. You are giving them a new charm & grace & beauty; they have gained, not lost, under your hand. They were never so finely told in prose before. And then the pictures - one can never tire of examining them & studying them. Long ago you made the best Robin Hood that was ever written, & your Morté d’Arthur is going to be another masterpiece. It was a great idea; I am glad it was born to you.” (Samuel L. Clemens to Howard Pyle, January 1, 1903)

“Will Mr. Howard Pyle accept through me the love of seven big and little children to whom he taught the beauty of language and of line, and to whom, in a desert place, he sent the precious message of Romance.” (Willa Cather inscription to Howard Pyle in The Troll Garden, April 26, 1906)

“Eleven and twelve years old we were, most of us, but I’ll wager no one of us has forgotten him, no one of us but has looked back on those wintry afternoons in the pleasant fire-lighted studio many times, realizing how vital a part of our background, literary and artistic, it has become. I was at boarding school when the news of his death in Florence reached me, and I knew then I had lost a very real friend.” (Virginia Kirkus in The Horn Book Magazine, November 1929)

“One of the very best men I know anywhere, one of the pleasantest companions, stanchest friends, and best citizens, is Mr. Howard Pyle, the artist.” (Theodore Roosevelt to Gifford Pinchot, September 9, 1907)

“I think that pirate duel is the most terrific thing I ever saw. I had almost all the sensations I have enjoyed at a prize fight. Oh if I were only a pluto I’d have that in the middle of my shack and when I wanted to be lifted out of the dreary run of existence I would take a look.” (Frederic Remington to Howard Pyle, November 13, 1908)

“There are many in this world who radiate the feeling of love and earnestness of purpose, but who have not the faculty or power to impart the rudiments of accomplishment. There is nothing in this world to inspire the integrity of youth like the combined strength of spirituality and practical headway. It gives the young student a definite clew, as it were, to the usefulness of being upright and earnest. Howard Pyle abounded in this combined power, and lavished it upon all who were serious.” (N. C. Wyeth in The Christian Science Monitor. November 13, 1912)

“I myself have always wondered that more people were not affected by Mr. Pyle’s piercing fineness of spiritual vision.... I don’t know any other American who had his extraordinary combination of fine qualities.” (Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Charles David Abbott, May 20, 1925)

“The battle picture at St. Paul is absolutely one of the most remarkable pictures of modern times.... You, of course, know of Mr. Pyle’s work through his illustrations, but unless you know the man personally you cannot realize what a perfectly charming fellow he is and how very beautiful and strong his paintings. He seems to cover a very wide range of subjects with absolute surety, and while preserving historic detail he never loses vitality and intense personal quality, while his sense of the decorative and the picturesque is most remarkable.” (Cass Gilbert to Ralph Adams Cram, December 31, 1907)

“It is quite unnecessary for you to talk to me about Howard Pyle, for there is no man in the United States for whom I have a more profound admiration.” (Ralph Adams Cram to Cass Gilbert, January 2, 1908)

“I have never valued a friend more.” (William Dean Howells to Gertrude Brincklé, October 17, 1919)

Howard Pyle’s Sphynx

Howard Pyle made the illustration shown here for William Dean Howells’ “Stops of Various Quills” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1894; it appeared in the book of the same name, which Harper & Brothers published - and which Pyle illustrated in full - the following fall. On October 30, 1895, Pyle wrote to Howells:

I am very proud of our book, a half dozen copies of which Harpers have just sent me. I arranged with them to return the picture of the Sphynx. I remember you expressed yourself as liking it rather much, and so, I think, as you inspired the picture, it should be yours. Accordingly I shall have it framed tomorrow and send it on to you as some token of the pleasure I had in illustrating your poems.

Then on November 3, 1895, Pyle wrote again:

I sent you yesterday, by express, my picture of the Sphynx which I want you to keep for my sake.

It seemed to me that, in your poems, the piping Pan of your soul went up into just such twilight altitudes as I have tried to depict; and hearing the sudden dim rustle of wings, turned so to see his Sphynx crouching where she had not been before. 

I want you to have the picture for that reason too.

Howells later mentioned the painting in a July 9, 1903, letter to Pyle: “I have turned a barn into a library here” - in Kittery Point, Maine - “and I wish you could see how I have placed that rich gift of yours...”

I doubt Pyle ever saw it, though. And I’ve been trying to find a photo of the painting hanging on the wall there, but so far I’ve come up short. However, I did find a snippet from the Mark Twain Quarterly (or Journal) of 1936, which says of Howells:

He stood benignly before a painting by his friend, Howard Pyle, who had given him the original of a famous book-illustration. He was as proud as a child to have on his study wall a painting by this artist.

A Thread Without a Knot

I couldn’t let Labor Day and “official” summer pass by without posting this delicate and relatively unknown pen-and-ink gem by Howard Pyle. It’s the headpiece for his story, “A Thread Without a Knot,” published in Harper’s Weekly for September 3, 1892. It shows the hero of the story, Jack Sylvester, and his temporary love interest, Miss Lannon, at an unidentified seashore...

Then she raised her parasol, and they went slowly down to the beach together. They sat just behind a little bank of sand that half hid them from the board walk. Sylvester lay beside her, stretched at length in the hot sand. “What are you reading?” said he; and he took up the book that she had brought with her. It was Howells’s Lady of the Aroostook. “Oh yes!” said he, without awaiting her reply.

“Have you ever read it?” said she.

Sylvester laughed. “Well, rather,” he said. “Lovely, isn’t it? Wonderful how he holds the interest centred in just those few characters and bounded by the narrow rails of the sailing ship!”

She did not make an instant response. “I don’t know,” said she, presently. “I haven’t got that far in the book. Yes, I think it’s a very nice story. Mamma brought a lot of books down with her, and I just began reading this this morning.”

Sylvester looked up quickly. Then he looked down again and began idly turning over the pages. “Did you ever read Silas Lapham?” said he, after a little while.

“No,” said she. “Who was it wrote it?”

“Howells wrote that too,” said he, a little dryly; and then he closed the book and gave it back to Miss Lannon.

Howells on Pyle on Art

This little exchange between W. D. Howells and his (unnamed) friend Howard Pyle appeared in Howells’ “Life and Letters” column in Harper’s Weekly for March 21, 1896, and was reprinted with the title “The What and the How in Art” in Howells’ book Literature and Life (Harper & Brothers, 1902):

Not long ago I was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from reading poetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps putting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoy pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul to those excellences of handling and execution which seemed chiefly to interest painters. He replied that it was a confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear and appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even insisted that a picture ought to tell a story.

Howard Pyle’s Reading List

Headband for A History of New York (The Grolier Club, 1886) by Howard Pyle

“I asked Mr. Pyle for a list of books he would recommend to me to read this winter and he gave me the following saying that when I had read these to come for more.”

So wrote Allen Tupper True to his mother on October 13, 1902. Pyle’s reading list included these titles, which are all still readily available:

By Nathaniel Hawthorne...

• Twice-Told Tales (1837)
• Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

By Washington Irving...

• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., (1819)
• A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)

By William Dean Howells...

• The Rise of Silas Lapham
• The Lady of the Aroostook (1879)

Not really hifalutin stuff, but True later explained, “Mr. Pyle’s list of books is rather queer but he seemed to think I would like and need light literature in connection with the grind I shall have at the studio.”

Of course, Pyle knew Howells personally and they collaborated on Stops of Various Quills, published in 1895.

Pyle also knew Hawthorne’s son, Julian, who interviewed him for an article in 1907. And his first (or second) known book illustration - in McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879) - was for an excerpt from “A Rill from the Town Pump” from Twice-Told Tales. The Brandywine River Museum now owns the original art (but I could have, if I hadn’t chickened out when it was offered to me. I still kick myself.). Also, in 1900, Pyle supervised the illustration of Twice-Told Tales by his students for Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co..

And the illustration shown above is one of three Pyle made for the Grolier Club’s 1886 edition of The History of New York.

Some Thoughts on Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art

My once-pristine copy of Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art by Jill P. May and Robert E. May is now full of grubby scribbles and marginalia. So... what do I think?

Frankly, I was hoping for something, well, fatter: more thorough, more comprehensive. Then again, I’m a glutton for Pyle data, and that wasn’t necessarily the authors’ aim. Still, at 206 pages (plus notes and index) it’s a relatively slim book - plus the price is high and the illustrations are few.

Also, I would have preferred a more rigidly chronological structure, if only to better capture the arc of Pyle’s multifaceted life. The authors’ transitions often feel too abrupt or arbitrary to me, the arrangement of details and events sometimes seems jumbled, and there are notable gaps and omissions. But no doubt the “Pylean timeline” in my head holds too much sway: I have too many preconceived notions of where things “ought to be” and how much attention they should get.

That being said, the authors - drawing from countless previously untapped sources - do bring many new things about Pyle to light - and they put them into broader historical context than has been the norm. They also confront issues which Charles D. Abbott’s and Henry C. Pitz’s hagiographies avoid...

Like Pyle’s seemingly contradictory attitudes toward his female students. The authors go far in dismantling the accusation that Pyle was a just cold-hearted sexist when he chose to bar women from his school. Rather, they explain that he consistently (and not so typically for that era) nurtured and championed talent in whomever he saw it; yet, time and again, he noticed his female trainees’ talents - and his investment in developing them - stifled by “marriage possibilities and domestic responsibilities.” Thus, since the ever-practical Pyle “did not want to expend great effort teaching students who might drop out of the field,” he came to focus his teaching energies on men.

The authors are also unafraid to tackle Pyle’s views on race. To a Pyle enthusiast, this topic is troubling: he was, after all, a privileged, paternalistic white man from a border state, and his writings contain some insensitive, unreconstructed, and - yes - racist things. But the authors show that, despite his unfortunate comments, Pyle was usually (though not always) “color-blind” when depicting black people in his illustrations. They also bring up the surprising point that Pyle essentially made an “endorsement of racial equality in heaven” in his most personal and emotionally-charged book, The Garden Behind the Moon. Well, equal rights “in heaven” are one thing, in real life they’re another, and while the authors are not apologists for Pyle’s prejudices, they at least add useful new twists to the conversation.

They also put Pyle’s often inscrutable Swedenborgianism - and how it influenced his life and work - into sharper, yet nuanced focus. And - as the title of the book promises - they deal at considerable length with Pyle’s messianic, if quixotic, quest to generate a staunchly “American” school of art. Indeed, this is the book’s overarching theme. And even though Pyle’s mission pretty much failed, the authors devote a chapter to demonstrate how, in myriad ways, his legacy has lived on.

Of course, as with any ambitious project borne out of fugitive data culled from far-flung archives and forgotten publications, a number of factual errors are present. And while these may only be noticeable to, say, a pedantic Pyle zealot, I feel obliged to highlight some in an ersatz “errata slip”:

• Page x: Richard Wayne Lykes wrote “Howard Pyle, Teacher of Illustration” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, not William W. Hummel (who wrote the article immediately preceding Lykes’s in that same issue)
• Page 3: Pyle only said that he lived in the “quaint old house of the colonial period” (known as “Green Hill”), not that he was born there. In fact, his father only purchased the property in August or September 1854. (See more on Pyle’s place of birth)
• Page 5: Pyle “confided to his friend” Edmund Clarence Stedman, not Richard Watson Gilder
• Page 9: Pyle actually “began his magazine career” with an illustration for his mother’s poem “The Reformer” in St. Nicholas (November 1875), not with “The Magic Pill” in Scribner’s Monthly (July 1876)
• Page 10: In 1876, Pyle roomed in the same building as The Misses Marshall’s School for Young Ladies at 250 West 38th Street in New York, not “Forty-eighth Street.” Granted, Pyle himself made this mistake in his scrapbook and in a 1903 interview, and then Abbott and Pitz took it on faith
• Page 17: Pyle brought a letter of introduction to the illustrator Frederick Stuart Church, not to “the renowned landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church”
• Page 26: “The Soldiering of Beniah Stidham” appeared in St. Nicholas for December 1892, not 1882
• Page 35: Library of Universal Adventure by Sea and Land, edited by William Dean Howells and Thomas Sergeant Perry (not “Thomas Sargeant”), merely reused a Pyle illustration from 1880. And in Pyle’s April 13, 1890, letter to Howells, he says, “now that I have the pleasure of your acquaintance” - which indicates that they hadn’t known each other long. Further evidence suggests that they may only have met in January 1890
• Page 47 and 120: Art editor Alexander W. Drake was not affiliated with any Scribner publications after 1881
• Page 49: Pyle did not create “a pamphlet of his own” in reaction to Henry Mills Alden’s God in His World, An Interpretation: some years after Pyle’s death, Merle Johnson made a transcription (which contains significant errors) of Pyle’s March 30, 1890, letter to Alden and published it in booklet form as “Sabbath Thoughts”
• Page 50: Pyle’s pen-and-ink drawings were for The One Hoss Shay (1891) and Dorothy Q (1892) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, not “a two-volume edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems” (although Pyle did contribute two illustrations to a set of Whittier’s works published at about the same time)
• Pages 115-6 and 172: Pyle’s correspondent here is Henry Howard Harper of the Bibliophile Society, not J. Henry Harper of Harper & Brothers. Also, on page 125, it was Henry Howard Harper who asked the Pyles to dine at the hotel
• Page 122: Samuel L. Clemens wrote his laudatory letter to Pyle on January 1, 1903, after reading no more than three installments of the serialized Story of King Arthur in St. Nicholas, not “after receiving a complimentary copy” of the book, published the following November
• Page 157: Pyle could not have “produced a startling 20 percent of all the color illustrations appearing in Harper’s, Century and Scribner’s magazines between 1906 and 1910” because none of his work appeared in the latter two magazines during those years (but maybe I’ve misinterpreted the equation)
• Page 175 (and Note 68): Pyle did not work “on a mural, despite lacking any commission” in Italy: the “major ‘decoration’” valued at $15,000 which Pyle “had hoped to place” in the St. Louis Public Library was the one he had painted for his Wilmington home in 1903-05
• The color reproduction of “The Landing of Carteret” is of not of the mural itself, but of Pyle’s smaller, much less finished study

Regarding some of the letters quoted - and here Pyle’s “dreadful chirography” is much to blame:

• Page 39: Not drawl, but “crawl out from underneath the load”
• Page 49: Not pitching, but “fetching a pocket full of religion”
• Page 105: Pyle’s students did not give him “a chain made of real clam feet” but an “old claw-foot chair”

I also don’t understand the rationale of referring to women by their middle and last names - i.e. Bertha Corson Day is called “Corson Day” (not simply “Day”) and Ellen Bernard Thompson is “Bernard Thompson” - especially when it causes more confusion than, I guess, it’s meant to prevent. Take this oddly constructed passage on page 94:

Eventually, Bernard Thompson and Walter Pyle were married, and while he was alive, she became inactive, returning to her art career after his death. Corson Day would continue to exhibit at the Plastic Club for the next few years, but once she and Bates were married, her career goals ebbed. Corson Day and Bernard Thompson had romantic relationships and put their art careers aside to get married, though Corson Day would continue to exhibit at the Plastic Club for the next few years and Thompson would return to art career after her husband’s death.

But these are the extreme examples, and although I could identify other “misdatings” and misspellings and so on, I’ll stop here. Again, they are, I suppose, relatively insignificant - and irritating only to the lunatic fringe of Pyle fandom.

If it sounds like I’m being unduly hard on this book... I guess I am. My know-it-allness gets the better of me when I see inaccuracies perpetuated in print, and I’m probably too close to the subject to be truly objective. But, after stepping back a bit, I see the enormity of what the authors have accomplished.

Howard Pyle called himself a “plain man”; others described him as “simple.” Well, maybe. If anything, I’ve found him to be an extraordinarily complex person, and the astonishing breadth of his acquaintance and interests and creative output - together with the sad fact that the bulk of his personal papers have been scattered or lost - make boiling down his life into a manageable 200 pages a nearly impossible task. The authors have succeeded, however, in harnessing a lot of ornery material - and presenting it admirably.

Critical, perceptive, and well-researched writings about Pyle are rare: they would barely fill out a foot’s-worth of shelf-space. This book deserves a place among them. My nitpicking aside, Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art is a huge leap forward in helping us understand who Pyle was, what inspired and motivated him, and where he fits into the history of art in America.

Stamford’s Soprano

In the early 1890s, when Howard Pyle was very much under the literary spell of his friend W. D. Howells, he wrote a handful of “realist” stories set in contemporary America. “Stamford’s Soprano” was one. It came out in Harper's Weekly for June 24, 1893, with the untitled illustration shown here. The original painting - I assume black and white oil on board - is still somewhere in the ether.

Interestingly, Howells wrote to Pyle: “Stamford’s Soprano is very neat and fine; but I like your psychical things best; not that I think you oughtn’t to do all the kinds you like; all you do pleases me.”

Skipping ahead to November 12, 2014...

Since posting this, the original painting has surfaced and is set to be sold by Heritage Auctions in New York on November 17, 2014. The oil on canvas laid on board measures 19 1/8 x 13 7/8 inches (48.6 x 35.2 cm) and is, of course, “a damned fine thing” (as Vincent Van Gogh might say).

Howard Pyle Misses the Mark?

The latest incarnation of the Autobiography of Mark Twain has been getting a lot of press. I don’t hold out much hope that Samuel L. Clemens’s “private” thoughts on Howard Pyle will be revealed therein or in subsequent volumes. In fact, I doubt that his thoughts would prove much different than the comments he made directly to Pyle or to his publisher. And even though they had many mutual friends and acquaintances (W. D. Howells and Albert Bigelow Paine, in particular), the two probably didn’t linger long enough in each other’s company for Clemens to form an opinion of Pyle the man.

As yet, I can only place these two in the same room at the same time at Mark Twain’s 67th birthday party hosted by George Harvey. Subsequently, Pyle was invited to the 70th birthday - Harvey’s even larger publicity stunt, held on December 5, 1905 - but he couldn’t attend. In sending his regrets to Clemens, Pyle wrote that “it is not often that a fellow craftsman can have it to say that in nearly half a century of work he should never have written any words that were not pure, and kind, and free of malice toward any of his fellow-creatures.”

Reviews of the autobiography, however, make Pyle sound pretty naive - or just hyperbolic and polite. In Slate, for instance, Judith Shulevitz says,

...this volume is punctuated by uncomic riffs - I believe they are meant to be funny - that quickly degenerate into furious rants, usually about former business partners who had grievously cheated Twain. The unvarnished truth about Twain/Clemens turns out to be his unvarnished rage.

At Mark Twain’s Birthday Party, 1902

Last year I wished Mark Twain a happy 174th birthday. And 108 years ago tonight Howard Pyle and 52 other men wished him a happy 67th birthday. The New York Times reported on it the next day:

Mark Twain’s sixty-seventh birthday, which falls on Sunday, was celebrated at the Metropolitan Club last night by a dinner given in his honor by Col. George Harvey, editor of Harper’s Weekly and The North American Review, and President of Harper & Brothers, publishers. It was attended by fifty-three guests, most of them prominent in the literary world.

Mark Twain may or may not have read the notices of his demise which certain newspaper paragraphers have from time to time inserted in their papers prematurely as an excuse for the perpetration of a real or imagined witticism, but last night he laughingly listened while John Kendrick Bangs read a long obituary of him in rhyme and rhythm.

Mr. Howells read a sonnet in which he referred to a number of incidents in Mark Twain’s life, and particularly the article the humorist wrote on foreign missionaries. The other speakers were Chauncey M. Depew, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, Col. George Harvey, W. D. Howells, Hamilton W. Mabie, Thomas B. Reed, Wayne MacVeagh, and Mr. Clemens.

Here is the complete list of 54 attendees (I can connect Pyle personally or professionally to about two dozen of them, but will spare you):

Henry Mills Alden
John W. Alexander
James Lane Allen
John Kendrick Bangs
August Belmont
Samuel Bowles
George Washington Cable
Will Carleton
Robert W. Chambers
Dumont Clarke
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Chauncey Depew
Frederick A. Duneka
Charles Froham
Hamlin Garland
Richard Watson Gilder
Will N. Harben
Henry S. Harper
J. Henry Harper
George Harvey
John Hay
William Dean Howells
Roy Rolfe Gilson
Thomas L. Janvier
Adrian Joline
John Larkin
Richard le Gallienne
William M. Laffan
W. B. Leeds
Frederick T. Leigh
Hamilton Wright Mabie
James MacArthur
Wayne MacVeagh
St. Clair McKelway
David A. Munro
William A. Nash
Adolph S. Ochs
Daniel O’Day
Howard Pyle
Thomas Bracket Reed
Dr. C. C. Rice
Henry H. Rogers
Thomas F. Ryan
Hamblen Sears
Ernest Thompson Seton
Francis Hopkinson Smith
Henry L. Stodard
Van Tassel Sutphen
Booth Tarkington
E. W. Townsend
Reverend J. H. Twichell
Henry Van Dyke
Horace White
George W. Young

July 27, 1895

“Your spiritual writings haunt me like personal experiences.”

William Dean Howells to Howard Pyle, July 27, 1895

“The Parting of My Little Boy”

No tragedy in Howard Pyle’s life could ever compare with the death of his son Sellers. The surrounding circumstances only made it more sad. He briefly outlined what happened in a letter I quoted, but here is some more...

Pyle’s journey to the West Indies was his first trip out of the country (with the probable exception of some Canadian jaunts in 1877). Jamaica was only supposed to be one stop on Pyle’s two-month-long itinerary: he also planned to visit Panama, the Bahamas, and other locales associated with his “Buccaneer heroes” in order to gather material for a couple of Harper’s Monthly articles and for a novel which he hoped would be his magnum opus. His wife, Anne, about nine weeks pregnant with their third child, would accompany him. Their two children would stay in Wilmington: Phoebe, 2, at home with Anne’s mother, and Sellers, 6, with his aunt (and Howard’s sister) Katharine Pyle, at the house she shared with her father at 802 Franklin Street.

Howard and Anne sailed from New York on February 9, 1889, on the Atlas Line steamship Ailsa. The voyage to Kingston took about a week and Pyle recorded his first impressions of their arrival in “Jamaica, New and Old” (Harper's Monthly, January 1890):

It was all like a dream, for there are times when the real and the unreal interweave so closely that it is hard to unravel the one from the other. Mostly gratification is the unfortunate part of anticipation; it is such a gross and tasteless fruit to be the outcrop of so pretty a flower; but that vision of the south coast of Jamaica, so long looked forward to, was at once so full of the lovely changes of afternoon and evening and moonlit night, and so full of suggestions of the romantic glamour of the past and by-gone life, that the bright threads of fancy and the duller strands of fact interwove themselves into such a motley woof that it was hard indeed to separate the one from the other.

It was almost yesterday that shivered under a heavy overcoat, with a bleak sky above and a sea of ice below; to-day floated upon the rise and fall of the great ground-swell of a tropic sea, flashing into spray under a humming trade-wind that set the feathery cocoa-palms and the ragged banana leaves upon the distant shore to tossing and swaying. Flying-fish shot like silver sparks, with a flash and gleam from the water to the right and the left, skimmed arrow-like across the heaving valleys of the waves, and disappeared far away with another flash and gleam.

Although Pyle’s article goes on to refer to Anne, it gives no hint of the awful way their plans changed.

Sellers Pyle died on the morning of February 22 and a telegram must have been sent to Jamaica almost immediately. In his Pyle biography, Henry Pitz wrote, “There was a desperate time of trying to find transportation back home and a wait of many days for a steamer sailing. They reached home long after the funeral.”

But I think Pitz was misinformed: Every Evening of February 23 stated, “The body of the boy was placed in a vault in the Wilmington and Brandywine cemetery to await the arrival of the bereaved parents,” and according to the “Marine Intelligence” of the New York Times, on February 25 the steamship Dorian - with the Pyles aboard - sailed from Morant Bay and arrived in New York on the evening of March 4. The Pyles may have spent the night in quarantine on the boat, but surely they arrived home by the following day, which also happened to be Howard’s 36th birthday.

Surprisingly, after only a week in Wilmington, Pyle returned alone to Jamaica to finish his work. He confined his travels and resultant two-part article solely to the island, however, and he never wrote a novel specific to the area.

Pyle’s leaving home so soon may seem cold-hearted, but his Swedenborgian faith had helped him find solace in a “firm and unfailing belief in a future life” - as well as in writing and drawing and painting.

“I have tried not to let my troubles interfere with my life’s work and ways and think I may say that I have pretty well succeeded,” he explained to Edmund Clarence Stedman. He added, “There are many sad things in this world but few that are unhappy excepting what we make for ourselves.”

And as time wore on, Pyle became more and more convinced that “the bitter delight of a keen and poignant agony” which Sellers’ death represented was necessary to make his own life complete: he saw it as “an agony that has dissolved much - almost all of the poison flesh leaving only a thin membrane to hide from the eyes the brighter light of a life beyond.” As he put it to W. D. Howells (after the publication of The Garden Behind the Moon, which he dedicated to Sellers), “Death is so thin a crust of circumstance that I can feel his heart beat just on the other side.”

February 18, 1892

"The temptation to talk is great but it is so dangerous to formulate thoughts into words. So formulated they become such hard stones of doctrines; such ready weapons to kill the prophets withal."

Howard Pyle to William Dean Howells, February 18, 1892

November 12, 1876

The rest of the day I spent in writing, and in the evening went down to the Mercantile Library and got Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion. It makes me feel blue when I read his style and then look at my own poor endeavors, the distance is so immeasurable that it makes me heartily discouraged. I wonder if the time will ever come when I will be able to do work somewhat to my satisfaction - I begin to think there’s poor prospect.

So wrote Howard Pyle to his mother on November 12, 1876, referring to what he had done the day before. At the time Pyle was living in a boardinghouse at 250 West 38th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan. I find it somewhat helpful - if that's the right word - when folks destined for greatness reveal their doubts and struggles. Or maybe it's just Schadenfreude.

Years ago, on a whim, I went to the General Research Division at the New York Public Library and requested an early edition of A Foregone Conclusion. Lo and behold, the copy had once belonged to the New York Mercantile Library and could very well have been the same one Pyle had read back in 1876.