Sculptor, was born in Salem, Mass., Feb. 12, 1819, and was graduated at Harvard in 1838. He was the son of the renowned jurist, Joseph Story. Law first claimed the son’s attention also; he was admitted to the bar, and became known as the author of treatises on the “Law of Contracts” (1844) and “Law of Sales” (1847), and other legal tomes. But he also contributed to various periodicals, delivered poems on several occasions, in 1847 brought out his first volume of poems, and in 1851 published “The Life and Letters of Joseph Story” (2 vols.). The direction in which his tastes lay had already been indicated in some of his writings, and in 1848 he went to Italy, where he devoted himself chiefly to art. He has modelled portrait-statues of his father, Edward Everett, and George Peabody; busts of Theodore Parker, Josiah Quincy, and James Russell Lowell; and a number of ideal works, among them Sappho, Saul, Cleopatra, Delilah, Helen, Jerusalem in her Desolation, Semiramis, Judith, Sardanapalus, and Thetis and Achilles. Some critics have seen talent rather than genius in these thoughtful, carefully executed works, but though not strikingly original, they are noble and pure in sentiment, the products of a highly cultivated mind. In Europe he has been regarded by many as the foremost among American sculptors. As an author he is almost equally well known, and has published “Roba di Roma,” sketches of Italian life, “Proportions of the Human Figure,” and various volumes of poems, including “Graffiti d’ Italia” and “The Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem.”

Personal

  The man was wiser, better than his books. One of the elect whom fate had fitted to his surroundings, he put to flight the old idea that to follow art aright one must forsake father and mother and cleave only unto her. He loved “dear Nature” and, leaning on her breast, he dreamed dreams and saw visions. In cool, shadowy places, with sense attuned to finest harmonies, he had ears to hear the grass grow, the trees stretch their limbs, the calling voices of naiads haunting the oaks, or to interpret far-off music, the messages of the winds and the waterfalls.

  Mrs. Story was a power in Rome, and for thirty years made her house a charming rendezvous for her country people. She had the gift of exclusiveness, so that it was never (as the houses of hospitable entertainers on the Continent are apt to be) abused or made common. One met the best people from every country there. Mr. Story was so exceptionally delightful and so renowned as an artist that everybody wanted to see him. He needed a wife with just such social gifts as she had. His studio on certain days could be visited, but of course every one was taught to respect his hours of work.

  Story had above all, among his many gifts, the right sensibility, given his New England origin; the latter had left him plenty to learn, to taste, to feel and assimilate, but it had not formed him, fortunately, without a universal curiosity, a large appetite for life or a talent that yearned for exercise. Nothing, indeed, seems to me to have been more marked for envy than the particular shade of preparation … involved in his natural conditions…. The best elements of the New England race, of its old life and its old attitude, had produced and nourished him, and it is quite, for our imagination, as if he had thus been engendered and constituted to the particular end of happily reacting from them. There are reactions that are charming, adequate, finely expressive; there are others that are excessive, extravagant, treacherous. Story’s was not of the violent sort, of the sort that makes a lurid picture for biography or drama; but it was conscious and intelligent, arriving at the pleasure and escaping the pain, a revolution without a betrayal.

General

  His dramatic studies, of which “A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem,” “A Jewish Rabbi in Rome,” and the repulsive strong “Cleopatra” are the chief, display a philosophic strength or a passionate fire rare indeed in a division of literature to which other Americans have made but feeble additions. Method and result occasionally suggest Browning, but only because the scenes and the historic thought of Italy seem naturally to have affected two minds in somewhat similar ways. A few of Story’s delicate and muse-born lyrics, such as “In the Moonlight,” “In the Rain,” “Love and Death,” and “In the Garden,” are of the poet’s own land—not merely Italy’s but Ariel’s and Endymion’s. Yet, notwithstanding the manlier tone of “Io Victis” (the thought of which Holmes better sang in “The Voiceless”), and “After Many Days,” Story’s sweetly verbose melancholy becomes monotonous, as in all other followers of Heine save Longfellow.

  “Conversations in a Studio” is not an era-maker in any sense. It purports to be the record of a series of long rambling conversations in the intervals of work, between one Mallet, who discourses, and one Belton who questions and mildly disagrees. Mallet is immediately recognizable as the author himself, and Belton is an imaginary foil invented by Mr. Story to keep himself going. But the illusion of argument is not well sustained, and if there is any disagreement in these pages it is an unrecorded one between Mr. Story and his reader. Simplicity is alike the characteristic of epigram and platitude, and both express some fundamental truth in a condensed form; but an epigram expresses truth which has been felt and not expressed,—a platitude expresses again what has been said and re-said until the world is weary. Mr. Story has always noted that line which divides the one from the other. It may be invidious to complain that he has not thundered out what he thinks in a great world-message, like the ipse dixit of Sartor; but it seems hardly necessary to make a book to tell us that “Shelley had a delicate and refined nature,” and that Burns’s “Farewell to Nancy” is “charming.” It cannot be denied that Mr. Story’s pen is an eminently facile one, and that he has succeeded in filling two volumes with opinions scarcely more valuable than these, and that his observations on art and literature are at times gracefully stated and nearly always amusing.

  Those who have known that the hand which chiselled the “Cleopatra” of the 1862 Exhibition, and wrote “Roba di Roma,” has also been for some years past contributing poems to sundry magazines, must have read those poems with considerable interest as they appeared from time to time; and whoever read Mr. Story’s “Primitive Christian in Rome,” published in The Fortnightly Review for December, 1866, must have been struck at once with the ability of that poem as a product of the psychological method employed by Browning. So able was that piece that it was evident that the author was no novice, though it was just as evident that he was not a poet of the first water. The poem lacked music more than anything else; but even in that it was not glaringly deficient; and, at the same time, it was so well thought out, the historic situation as well as the attitude of the speaker’s mind were so well rounded off to an issue, that it was impossible not to be interested to know what hoard of such wares the author was saving up…. Not imitative of Browning in matters of detail, Mr. Story has yet, in the best of his poems, clearly assimilated the method of this most original and powerful of contemporary poets, and, I should say, he has consciously and studiously assimilated it—a thing which is the more to his credit, looking at the difficulty of working in that method as compared with many others.

  His verse is easy, elevated and correct, but it is the verse of a sculptor with whom form is everything. It must be admitted, too, that while there is nothing in his mature verse to betray his nationality, save the occasional appearance of so-called Americanisms in his diction, he has not been without his obligation to American literature, as reflected in certain echoes of Longfellow and Holmes. Story’s intellectual powers, however, were of too high an order to rest at imitation. His narratives and dialogues hold a place entirely their own in our literature. The vein of melancholy which Hawthorne was surprised to observe among Story’s personal traits runs through the artist’s narratives and lyrics. This tone of sadness leaves an impression of “beauty akin to pain” impossible to resist, but utterly different from the Byronic despair which afflicted the songsters of Story’s youth. He is a master of expression, though his facile command of language occasionally leads to an infringement of the rule which he so felicitously announced in his “Couplets.”