Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  Prowling England for treasures, Bender temporizes with the lovely, “hard up” Lady Sandgate, who urges on him Lawrence’s portrait of her great-grandmother—“the most beautiful woman of her time,” she insists, “and the greatest of all Lawrences.” Bender is after bigger game—some “ideally expensive thing”—and when he tours Dedborough Place, the country estate of Lady Sandgate’s friend Lord Theign, he particularly wants the great Duchess of Waterbridge by Joshua Reynolds. Theign, however, refuses to “traffic.”

  “People have trafficked,” observes Theign’s daughter Lady Grace—the acute Jamesian observer at the story’s moral center: “people do; people are trafficking all round.”

  “Ah,” cries her new friend Hugh Crimble, a young art scholar who bears strong resemblances to Roger Fry and to James’s friend Hugh Walpole: “that’s what deprives me of my rest and, as a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours.… Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very quickest—a century and more ago—of their ever coming in.”

  England’s precious things, Lady Grace points out, don’t really belong to England: “I suppose our art-wealth came in—save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!—mainly by purchase too, didn’t it? We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere else, didn’t we? We didn’t grow it all.”

  This pulls Hugh up short for a moment, then: “We grew some of the loveliest flowers—and on the whole to-day the most exposed. Great Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you’ll recognise, a vast garden in themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than your splendid ‘Duchess of Waterbridge’?”

  Which brings them to the subject of Mr. Bender. James draws him in caricature—a booming, energetic American with a big checkbook and bigger ideas, who is more interested in what he wants than what he has, and uses native locutions such as “ain’t,” “I guess,” “anyhow,” and “hey.” The others refer to him as “a money-monster,” “a terror,” “you dreadful rich thing,” “the wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi,” the avatar of “such a conquering horde as invaded the old civilisation, only armed now with huge cheque-books instead of spears and battle-axes.” Yet Bender is far less malignant a presence than the brutal and stupid Lord Theign of Dedborough (listen to the names), bloated with an empty sense of his own “noble” value, more willing to sell his daughter than one of his heirlooms.

  James describes Bender as “all genial and all sincere,” with a “voracious integrity,” “always easy, but always, too … aware of everything.” Bender takes the perceptive measure of Hugh’s real intelligence. He displays a “dangerous” knowledge of Dutch painters. And he has a far more expansive sense of value than most of his British counterparts. Discussing a portrait by Moretto of Brescia—which Hugh now thinks may be an exceedingly rare Mantovano—Grace’s repugnant suitor, Lord John, wants to know whether a Mantovano would be “so much greater a value” than a Moretto.h

  Hugh asks, “Are you talking of values pecuniary?”

  Lord John: “What values are not pecuniary?”

  “Hugh might, during his hesitation, have been imagined to stand off a little from the question. ‘Well, some things have in a higher degree that one, and some have the associational or the factitious, and some the clear artistic.’

  “ ‘And some,’ Mr. Bender opined, ‘have them all—in the highest degree.’ ”

  Bender has a sense of humor about himself. When he asks Hugh how much “higher under the hammer” the picture would come as a Mantovano, Hugh turns to Lord Theign: “Does Mr. Bender mean come to him, my lord?”

  Theign looks hard at them both—“I don’t know what Mr. Bender means!”—and turns away.

  Bender continues: “Well, I guess I mean that it would come higher to me than to any one! But how much higher?”

  “How much higher to you?”

  “Oh, I can size that. How much higher as a Mantovano?”

  And when Theign asks why he can’t simply make the Moretto as expensive as he likes, Bender sounds positively Jamesian: “Because you can’t do violence to that master’s natural modesty.”

  Theign finally determines more out of spite than generosity to give the authenticated Mantovano to the National Gallery, and forces Lady Sandgate to donate her Lawrence in kind. Bender goes away empty-handed, having inadvertently effected this happy (for England) outcome. In the “larger morality” of James’s drama, he comes off relatively well.

  Whereas James drew on aspects of Morgan for his fictional Breckenridge Bender, E. M. Forster referred to the financier by name in his 1910 novel, Howards End. Roger Fry, who was a friend of Forster’s and had recently been dismissed by the Metropolitan Museum, probably served as a source of information, and Virginia Woolf may have as well; but Morgan was a familiar figure in England, and the novelist no doubt had impressions of his own.

  The events in Howards End turn on matters of money—who has it, who doesn’t, how it has shaped England and her empire, what it makes possible in the Bloomsbury group’s ideal life of humane values and moral imagination, and how cruelly its power can be abused by those who have no such values or imagination. In Forster’s portrait of Edwardian England, the wealthy Wilcox men “seemed to have their hands on all the ropes,” and they live in a world of “panic and emptiness,” “telegrams and anger”—at a far remove from the intellectual Schlegel sisters with their passionate commitment to an ethos of personal relations.

  Helen Schlegel, talking with a bank clerk named Leonard Bast whose life has been inadvertently ruined by Mr. Wilcox, is enraged at the rich man’s refusal to take responsibility for what he has done. “I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you?,” she asks Leonard. “And in personal everything. I hate—I suppose I oughtn’t to say that—but the Wilcoxes are on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps the little thing that says ‘I’ is missing out of the middle of their heads, and then it’s a waste of time to blame them. There’s a nightmare of a theory that says a special race is being born which will rule the rest of us in the future just because it lacks the little thing that says ‘I.’ Had you heard that?”

  Leonard: “I get no time for reading.”

  “Had you thought it, then? That there are two kinds of people—our kind, who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind who can’t, because their heads have no middle. They can’t say ‘I.’ They aren’t in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said ‘I’ in his life.”

  Leonard tries gamely to engage Helen’s argument. “ ‘I never got on to Nietzsche,’ he said. ‘But I always understood that those supermen were rather what you may call egoists.’

  “ ‘Oh, no, that’s wrong,’ replied Helen. ‘No superman ever said ‘I want,’ because ‘I want’ must lead to the question ‘Who am I?’ and so to Pity and to Justice. He only says ‘want.’ ‘Want Europe,’ if he’s Napoleon; ‘want wives,’ if he’s Bluebeard; ‘want Botticelli,’ if he’s Pierpont Morgan. Never the ‘I’; and if you could pierce through him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.’ ”

  If Morgan was in the unusual position of being a hero to his literary valet, he was many other things as well. Though Belle Greene leaped to defend him from other people’s scorn, she herself often disparaged his taste, partly to flaunt her recently acquired own. “JP is so well trained now,” she boasted to Berenson early in 1911, “that he rarely ever buys a book or manuscript without consulting me.” She cheered when her “Boss” sent six “exquisite manuscripts,” a Perugino, and the Memlings from the Kann Collection to the library, but she wished all his purchases “were of that quality,” and dismissed some of his acquisitions as “punk,” “truck,” and “trash.” Still, the verbal pictures she drew to enhance her own image also captured Morgan’s tyrannical possessiveness and some of the less attractive ways in which he used the p
ower of his money.

  Belle on occasion defied him, and their worst battles came when he suspected she might leave him for another man. In the fall of 1911, he heard a rumor that she was engaged, “which made him rave & foam at the mouth,” she told BB. “He really was so ridiculous that I became disgusted and angry & told him that had it been true it was none of his business which caused our relations to be somewhat strained for a day or two. Finally he came to me with tears & crocodile heart breakings beseeching me not to leave him, not to marry any one & not to look at any man. I confess that in spite of my really sincere love and admiration for him, I was thoroughly annoyed & disgusted and I could hardly keep from telling him so.”

  They repeated the scene a month later—“he went into a towering rage. I really thought he was going to have an apoplectic fit. I just stood & looked at him & listened to him in disgust especially when he wound up with ‘the day you get married will be the last day I shall set eyes on you & you won’t get anything from me if you do (I daresay I told you that he put me in his will). Well, I was mad (as he so often makes me feel nowadays) and I told him that in the first place I had no intentions of marrying anybody any time—but that if I had, not all his anger or all his threats of ‘disinheritance’ would bother me in the slightest, that I not only did not care a damn … for his money but there were many times when it disgusted me—that he could buy a great deal with his gold but not me or my affections. I really was so furious that I got it all out in one breath & then he was aghast—& said ‘I don’t like you to speak to me that way.’ Said I—‘I don’t like it either but you make me lose (temporarily) the real respect I have for you when you talk to me as you did, as if I was something you had bought & paid for.’ Then I went out of the room still so mad that I almost murdered two or three dealers who were waiting to see me. But in about half an hour he came out & apologized at great length. He is much too accustomed to talking to people as he pleases and I certainly am not going to let him start that with me. Even if I have to leave him. I suppose no one else would pay me the salary he does but I can live on less if necessary at any rate I will not be talked to as he might to a mistress or a chamber maid.…”

  For Labor Day weekend of 1912 Morgan planned to go off on Corsair from Sunday to Tuesday, and Belle told him she would be visiting friends on Long Island. (No longer living on 115th Street uptown, she had an apartment near the library.) When she arrived in the country Sunday afternoon, she found a telegram from him telling her to be at the library “without fail” at nine-thirty Monday morning. Thinking something important must have happened, she drove back to town early on Monday. “He just laughed when I saw him—calmly announced that the important business was to see me, and sat here until 7 o’clock when he went away to dress for a dinner engagement.” He had wanted to reel her in. “That is the sort of thing that makes me lose my high reverence for him—because it means nothing—simply a cussed desire to demand my presence and to show that he has a right to—in spite of all of which I am deeply and truly devoted to him and would and will do all I can for him. In his heart he is fond of me and loyal and I know that were I ever in any trouble he would speed to the rescue.”

  He often reminded her that she could do anything she liked except leave the country for six months of the year while he was away, and “it seems but little that you be with me as much as I wish for the other six.” Reflecting on this deal to Berenson, she said, “not for one instant would I grumble were it not for you.” She suspected that Morgan now opposed her going abroad because he had heard about her relations with BB, “and for that reason … I (a tiny bit) despise him—And when you think of his 75 years of affaires du coeur!

  “However, aside from my affection for him, I must submit for a reason I believe I have not told you before.” Actually, she had told him before. “That is, he put me into his will, at a fairly good figure, contingent upon the agreement that I would never leave him while he was alive—now that will make me seem pretty mercenary to you—but it means a number of things which may be important to both you and me. For instance it means that after his death I shall be in a certain small way independent, that I can adopt what line of work I want … that I can travel and that I can provide for my family and so not have them hanging around my neck—

  “You see what I mean dear—and it cannot be a very long time (I hate to write that).…”

  * Berenson attributed the picture to Pintoricchio in 1909, and pronounced it worth $25,000 to $30,000 at most. Later, he labeled it a fake. Morgan hung the painting in his West Room, and though Bode listed it as one of four authentic Raphaels in America at the end of 1911, it turned out not to be. Morgan’s heirs sold it at auction in 1944 as “School of Raphael,” for $2,500.

  † With a shallow draft and steep sides, this steam-powered houseboat had been fitted out in Morgan style: 130 feet long, it had a glass forward observation deck, a dining room and three staterooms on the main deck, and seven more staterooms as well as servants’ quarters below. It had cost about $60,000.

  ‡ The piece is now in the Metropolitan Museum.

  § A famous political scandal forced Victoria’s father to leave Washington in 1888. A man who signed himself Charles Murchison and claimed to be English wrote from California to ask the British minister which candidate in the upcoming U.S. election would be better for England. Sackville-West foolishly replied that he favored the incumbent Democrat, Cleveland, for a second term. “Murchison” turned out to be a Republican, and the minister’s letter was leaked to the press ten days before the election: BRITISH LION’S PAW THRUST INTO AMERICAN POLITICS, declared the headlines, and the State Department demanded Sackville-West’s recall. Victoria’s father became the second Lord Sackville when his brother, Mortimer, died a month later. He held the title until his own death in 1908, at which point the younger Lionel and Victoria became Lord and Lady Sackville.

  ‖ Spring-Rice, a British diplomat and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, wrote the lyrics to “I Vow to Thee My Country,” which became the favorite hymn of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was played at her wedding and funeral.

  a Estates worth more than £1 million would be taxed at 25 percent, a supertax would be imposed on incomes over £5,000, and a 20 percent land tax levied on the unearned gain in value when land changed hands.

  b The death of Harry Elkins Widener on the Titanic provided an unexpected benefit for Harvard. Looking to build a new library, the university had asked Jack in 1910 whether his father might be inclined “to help us out on a big scale.” Jack said he never approached his father about financial gifts, but over the next two years he conferred regularly with Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell about the project, discussing such potential donors as Frick, Carnegie, Mrs. Russell Sage, Peter Widener, and Isador Straus (“whose people are very high class,” Jack wrote, “and who might help us with the Hebrew fraternity here”).

  In February of 1912, Jack reported that Joseph Choate was opposed to asking Carnegie, since the College was “too dignified to have a Carnegie Library” and would not want “inevitably attached to Harvard for all time Mr. Carnegie’s name.” Early in April, Jack suggested that Bishop Lawrence “speak to Father about the Library”—it would help to say that George Baker might contribute, as “he likes to do things with that gentleman.”

  Two weeks later, Harry Widener drowned. A graduate of Harvard (’07) and a serious book collector, this grandson of Peter Widener had just bought a 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s Essaies from Bernard Quaritch in London, remarking that he planned to take it with him on the Titanic—“if I am shipwrecked it will go with me.” His mother reached New York with the other survivors on April 19. The Philadelphia book and art dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach told Belle Greene that Mrs. Widener had known “nothing of the fate of her husband and Harry until informed of it on the dock. The shock was overwhelming as she thought they were in another boat.” That summer, Eleanor Elkins Widener agreed to build Harvard’s library in memory of her son. The architect
, whom she designated as a condition of the gift, was Horace Trumbauer.

  c Carl Hovey, the editor of Metropolitan Magazine, had written a series of articles on Morgan, and published them as a book in 1911. When the publisher, Sturgis & Walton, advertised the volume as an “authorized” biography, Morgan complained: “As you know,” he wrote, “this statement is false, as I have never seen the person who wrote the book nor had anything whatever to do with it.” Hovey’s portrait was, on the whole, flattering. Belle Greene probably read the book aloud to Morgan, for in 1912 she recorded some of his comments in the margins of her copy.

  d Morgan left Miss Linley to Jack in his estate. It was eventually sold, and now belongs to the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass. Lady Sackville won the lawsuit brought by the Scotts in June 1913, partly by virtue of her star performance in the witness box. At one point she scolded a cross-examining lawyer, “You don’t seem to realize, Mr. Smith, that Knole is bigger than Hampton Court.” The judge told the members of the jury that if the “influence” Victoria had exercised over Sir John was that of friendship, “the influence arising out of a community of tastes, out of the affinity of natures … it was perfectly legitimate, and you ought to say so in your verdict.” They did. The judgment made Lady Sackville rich. She got £150,000 outright, and sold off the contents of the Paris house for £270,000. “This,” observed her grandson, “was perhaps the only shameful part of the affair, for Seery (as she well knew) had hoped she would use his ‘fine things’ to enrich the Knole collection, not sell them to provide her with pocket money.”