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Chapter One: Well Read in Poetry, Fair in Knowledge: Henry and Emily Form a Team
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter One q q q Well Read in Poetry, Fair in Knowledge Henry and Emily Form a Team And by good fortune I have lighted well On this young man, . . . well read in poetry And other books—good ones, I warrant you. The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.169–72 Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue. Sonnet 82.5 After the Civil War, a newly muscular American economy became seriously competitive with Europe in international affairs. Culturally, too, the affluent middle and upper classes began, at about the time of the centennial, to resent the long-nosed disapproval of foreign commentators. For every Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce who mostly admired American individualism and risk-taking daring , there had been a Frances Trollope or dyspeptic Charles Dickens mocking the country’s rough-hewn manners. Henry James and Henry Adams were among the vocal cultural critics who despaired that America was fated to play merely a cameo role in the grand civilizing drama of Continental culture, which honored a past America ignored. In historic Boston, where Henry James returned in 1904 after a twenty-year absence, he sniffed, “What was taking place was a perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate . . . The will to grow was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or whose expense.”1 The drive for material success over all would doom the nation’s cultural institutions to the second rank. To be sure, wealthy Americans such as Jenny Jerome were eagerly sought-after marriage material for land-poor English aristocrats like the Duke of Marlborough, but the exchange was perceived, as the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James show, as trading money for lineage and social gloss. Frances Trollope’s younger son, Anthony, took his second-generation shots in books 2 Collecting Shakespeare like The American Senator (1877) and other novels where American visitors are usually foils, bumptious and crude. Many native-born American industry leaders and inheritors of wealth supported the arts and wanted the United States to equal Europe as a patron. Henry Clay Frick may have been one of “the Worst American CEOs of All Time,” rivaling John D. Rockefeller for the dubious sobriquet “most hated man in America,” but the opulent Frick Collection opened to the public on Fifth Avenue in 1935 housed a treasure trove of Rembrandts, El Grecos, Corots, Goyas, and more.2 Frick’s close friend Andrew Mellon endowed the National Gallery of Art, and Rockefeller’s philanthropies continue today in the fourth generation of that family. The story of Henry Clay Folger—self-effacing, self-made colleague of John D. Rockefeller and Charles Pratt and ultimately president of Standard Oil of New York—is another American story giving the lie to the notion that every Gilded Age striver cared only for personal wealth. The seed of the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library was sown when Emily Jordan, “fair in knowledge,” and Henry Folger, “well read in poetry and other books,” attended a beach picnic and realized they shared a passion for Shakespeare. On June 7, 1882, members of the Irving Literary Circle of Brooklyn traveled to nearby Sands Point on Long Island Sound. The menu for the club’s third annual excursion was hearty and extensive in the Edwardian mode: mock turtle soup, baked black bass with white wine sauce, ribs of beef, lamb, spring chicken, vegetables, pickles—and, to refresh the palate if not trim the waistline, plum pudding with vanilla ice cream. After the feast, toastmaster Charles Pratt, the oil refiner and philanthropist , proudly turned to twenty-five-year-old Henry, who quoted lines from As You Like It. With a twinkle, Pratt then asked Emily Clara Jordan for a toast, which included a passage from Othello. Young Charlie Pratt and his sister Lillie, a Vassar chum of Emily, may have been up to a little matchmaking. But the young picnickers could hardly foresee that the bookish Henry and Emily would marry three years later, much less build a world-class research library in the depths of the Great Depression. Henry Folger‘s quiet presence at the picnic showed a scholarly demeanor that had already impressed Pratt. Henry revered Pratt not only because he had paid for part of Folger’s junior year at Amherst after Henry’s father went bankrupt but also because, one week after college graduation, Pratt became his boss. Anxious to pay off his debt...