Identifier: johnlafargememoi00cort_1 (find matches)
Title: John La Farge : a memoir and a study
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Cortissoz, Royal, 1869-1948
Subjects: La Farge, John, 1835-1910
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company :
Contributing Library: Getty Research Institute
Digitizing Sponsor: Getty Research Institute

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VII

THE OLD MASTER

WISDOM was the capstone of his career,
the fruition of his long labors — wis-
dom, and a clairvoyance which made him free
of all the real things. If this were a formal bio-
graphy I suppose I would occupy myself in
reciting quantities of external incidents,—the
commissions given to La Farge, the medals
won, the degrees conferred upon him by
learned institutions, and all the other miscel-
laneous details of a long life. But this is not a
formal biography. What I have endeavored
to do has been simply to portray the La Farge
I knew, a personality, a mind, an artistic force.
It is for this reason also that I have refrained
from the analysis of scores of works of his,
very familiar to me and full of material tempt-
ing to discuss. In any case the recording and
describing of all of a man's productions is a
doubtful enterprise, far more doubtful than we
are won't to think, with our modern infatuation
for what we are pleased to regard as historical
completeness. It is the notion that to be criti-


John La Farge in 1902

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[ 207 ]

cally exhaustive we must count all the leaves
on the tree that explains the frequent preser-
vation of stuff which a great artist would de-
stroy if he knew the moment in which he was
to die. It has been responsible, too, for the
transformation of many a biography into a
wearisome catalogue.
The greatest of artists has his lapses and his
longueurs, not moments merely but days in
which inspiration fails and something like
gaucherie descends upon him. La Farge him-
self has said that hero worship is not the best
key to understanding. True appreciation of
Whistler, for example, has been seriously ar-
rested in many quarters by the ululations of
the fanatics who would have it that every
touch of a masters hand is priceless. Some-
times it is almost valueless, being without
nervous force or purpose. La Farge knew
well enough that a work of art is not to b
emeasured by a foot rule and then to be sum-
marily dismissed as good or bad. He knew also
the weight and profound truth of that saying
of Keats: " When I feel I am right, no exter-
nal praise can give me such a glow as my own
solitary reperception and ratification of what
is fine." Writing to me of a new window that

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