The Story of My Life: Recollections and ReflectionsTerry, Ellen
General
The Story of My Life: Recollections and Reflections
Terry, Ellen
Actresses -- Great Britain -- Biography; Terry, Ellen, Dame, 1847-1928
Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
wrote to a friend of mine that "Bastien had '_le coeur au mŽtier_.' So
has Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to
replace the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about
this frame, and took such a lot of trouble to get it right. It must have
been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that
extraordinary official puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty
censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the
World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful
little nude figure of a boy holding an olive branch, emblematical of
young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were
substituted.
Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
was chosen for the monument in St. Gile's Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend Joe
Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect.
Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
beautiful in execution. Whatever he did he put the best of himself into
it. I wrote to my daughter soon after his death:--
"I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I keep on
getting letters about him. He seems to have been so glad to die. It
was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends
seem to have been there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about
the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he
says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there.'
I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being
the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."
Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
inscribed, "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theater, New York,
had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
"Peter the Great" and other plays.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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