Unforgotten Years

Logan Pearsall Smith

Description

Beautifully and elegantly written by a really witty and consummate craftsman of the written word. Full of reminiscences aboard Edith Wharton's yacht, boyhood in Philadelphia, a first trip abroad, Haverford College, Harvard, youthful associates, a year in Germany, a few months at home in the family business, then the determination to live abroad and write. Manuscript hunting, Oxford, the Paris of Whistler, Henry James, ten years in Sussex. Sage and entertaining literary chit-chat, delightfully done...

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Literary Figures

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644539
• Langue: English

Extrait

Unforgotten Years
by Logan Pearsall Smith

First published in 1938
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

UNFORGOTTEN YEARS

by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

1

e are anchored at Phalerum;how can I spend the morning betterthan in beginning to write myreminiscences? My hostess is, I believe, writinghers in her stateroom above; I think Ishall follow her example. Hers will sell by thethousands, for she is a famous writer; I cannothope for an interest like this in mine, butthere may be people who will like to look atthem, and I shall enjoy calling back the past.Certainly I shan’t read them to my friendlybut extremely critical companions on thiscruise. For one thing there won’t be time;our days are spent in looking at the ÆgeanIslands, or in seeing sights on shore. In theevening we sit on deck and talk; or, if thewind is blowing, we listen in the cabin toRobert Norton’s reading of Butcher andLang’s translation of the Odyssey , and beautifullyhe reads it.
So with this brief preface I begin the recordof my boyhood and youth, to which I mayadd, if the spirit moves me, a few of the experiencesof my later years.
It is the custom of good Americans tobestow, somewhat in the Chinese fashion, akind of posthumous nobility upon their ancestors;to transform the farmers and smalltradesmen from whom they are almost alldescended into scions of great, historic Englishhouses. This innocent exercise of thefancy produces a good deal of blameless satisfaction,since there is indeed, I believe, amore abiding sense of noble birth to be derivedfrom false than from authentic pedigrees;and plebeian blood flows with a moreconsciously aristocratic thrill through theveins of those who have dyed it in the azureof their own imaginations.
It is not for me, at least, to reprobate suchdelusions, for was I not nourished in myyouth upon them? Had not certain elderlyand imaginative members of my family succeeded,after long meditation, in adorningthe mediocrity of their circumstances withat least one escutcheon, in tracing one portionof their line to aristocratic sources?
Of the plebeian lineage and name of Smiththey could indeed make little; the Smithswere only too plainly a race of Yorkshireyeoman farmers, who, becoming Quakers,had emigrated to New Jersey in the time ofWilliam Penn, and, settling in the quiet townof Burlington on the Delaware, had engagedin commerce with the West Indies, watchingthe broad river for the arrival of small brigantinesor “snows,” which sailed thither, ladenwith the products of the South. But one ofthem in the eighteenth century, my grandfather’sgrandfather, with the respectablename of John Smith, had married a daughterof the secretary whom William Penn hadbrought to Pennsylvania and left there as hisrepresentative.
This secretary, James Logan, was, so historysays, the son of a schoolmaster of Scottishdescent at Lurgan in the north of Ireland.When the troubles of the civil wardrove the family to Bristol, young Loganwas apprenticed to a linen draper, but becameafterwards a master in the school his fatherstarted there. This father belonged to arespectable Scottish family and neither henor his son claimed a nobler derivation. Inthe creative imagination of their descendantsin America, however, they became membersof a noble and famous race, the Logans ofRestalrig, and owners of that Fast Castlewhich was described by Scott in The Bride ofLammermoor as the house of Ravenswood.One of the Logans had gone to Palestine asa Crusader, to convey thither the heart ofRobert Bruce, and another had been hanged,centuries later, for his participation in theGowrie Conspiracy.
This background of crusades and crimes,with imaginary castles and gallows in the distance,shed a kind of glamour on the lives ofthese mild Quakers, who, in spite of theQuaker ban on worldly fiction, must, it appears,have been reading Waverley Novels onthe sly. And was it not for them all perfectlyauthentic? Had not one of them crossed theAtlantic and made a special pilgrimage toScotland, and there, on the spot, when visitingthe estate of this famous family, beenovercome by a profound conviction of itstruth? Was not the heart of Bruce whichadorned the arms of the Restalrig family(arms which James Logan had never dreamtof assuming)—was not this bleeding heartsplashed upon the note paper and engravedupon the silver of the family in Philadelphia?What genealogist could demand, what documentscould provide, more convincing evidencethan this?
These imagined glories rather obscured inthe eyes of his descendants their ancestor’sreal distinction; for William Penn’s secretaryhad become the most remarkable inhabitantof the English colonies during the first half ofthe eighteenth century. Remaining in Pennsylvaniaas the agent for William Penn andhis sons, he held in turn every importantoffice in that commonwealth. He was the masterof many languages, and an authority alsoon mathematics and astronomy, and as abotanist he made an important contributionto the theory of the sexuality of plants. Hecorresponded with learned men all overEurope, and collected the finest library inAmerica, containing all the best books onhistory, on art and geography, of the time,as well as all the Latin and Greek classics,including Bentley’s editions. He transformedPhiladelphia in fact into the Athens ofAmerica, as it was called; and it was thitherthat Benjamin Franklin fled in his youthfrom a less cultivated Boston. Of Franklinand his printing press he was one of the earliestpatrons, and Franklin printed for himtwo of his translations from Cicero, in one ofwhich, described as the first translation madein America from the classics, the youngprinter expressed a hope that “this firsttranslation of a classic in the Western worldmight be a happy omen that Philadelphiashall become the seat of the Muses.” Thishope, I may note in passing, has not beenyet fulfilled, though my ancestor did his bestto prepare for the advent of the Nine to theQuaker city, by bequeathing his books to thePhiladelphia Library which Benjamin Franklinfounded there.
In the meantime his son-in-law, the JohnSmith I have mentioned, occupied himself ina prosperous commerce with the West Indies,exchanging grain, lumber, and other productsof the North for sugar, rum, and molassesfrom the South. These were transported in hisown vessels, built in his own shipyard at Burlington,and sailing from the wharf therewhich he owned. After publishing in Philadelphia,where he dwelt, a pamphlet in defense ofthe pacifist principles of the Quakers, he hadretired to the family home at Burlington, upthe river, and spent the rest of his life in readingand, as his grandson, my grandfather, putit, in “copying into commonplace books thosesentiments and sententious remarks of favoriteauthors which he approved.” This tastefor copying out was shared by his family anddescendants. His brother, Samuel Smith, compiledfrom many documents a history of NewJersey which is still, I believe, cited by thosewho are interested in that subject; his son,who inherited the name of John Smith, inheritedthis taste also and filled several volumeswith the lives and memorable sayingsof New Jersey Quakers; his grandson, whowas my grandfather, published many colonialdocuments; and I too, with the variousdocuments and anthologies I have published,have not failed in carrying on this familytradition.
I like to think of that lot of quiet and bookishold forbears, among whom was at leastone minor poet, settled on the banks of theDelaware among the wigwams and papoosesof the Indians, thinking their mild Quakerthoughts in their meetinghouses, or listeningto the preaching of John Woolman, who alsolived at Burlington, and was their friend andneighbor. They seem to have been content tospend their lives in this Quaker Arcadia, fishingin the broad river which flowed past theirfarms, or reading the books which trickledover to them across the Atlantic, and copyingout sententious extracts from those eighteenth-centuryvolumes.
My grandfather, however, John Jay Smith,left Burlington as a boy, and sailing down theDelaware to Philadelphia, establishing himselfthere first as a chemist’s assistant, soonbegan to engage in other activities. Amongthe stipulations which James Logan had madein bequeathing his books to the PhiladelphiaLibrary was one to the effect that his eldestson should be the librarian, and his eldestgrandson in the male line should succeed;and should the male line fail, the positionshould be offered to the eldest of the femaleline. To my grandfather this appointmentwas given; he occupied it many years, andwas succeeded in it by one of my uncles.James Logan’s will was, I believe, invalid;the position thus dubiously bequeathed wasa modest one; but since it was held for morethan fifty years by members of our family,our claim to this humble librarianship cameto be regarded, at least by ourselves, as conferringa kind of dim distinction; and it wasoriginally intended that I should succeed myuncle (who had no son) in this, as we imaginativelydesignated it, the only hereditaryoffice in America.
It was from this old Philadelphia Library,an eighteenth-century building in the neighborhoodof Independence Square, with its airof venerable antiquity,—for the few oldbuildings found in a new country seem to possessa more antique aspect than anything inEurope,—it was in this