Hawaii - James Michener [448]
His preoccupation with researches into Hawaiian history developed an accidental concomitant which outraged all of Yale and led to his temporary withdrawal from the university. He was in the library one day, reading files of an early Honolulu newspaper, the Polynesian, for he wished to refresh his mind as to what that journal's excitable editor, James Jackson Jarves, had actually said about missionaries, and for a while he got bogged down in the story of how Jarves had protested when a French warship roared into Honolulu, insisting that French wines be imported in unlimited amounts, and of how the French authorities threatened to lash him through the streets with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Next he turned the yellowed pages to read of the time when the British consul actually did horsewhip poor Jarves for defending Hawaii against British intrusions into local affairs, and he began to laugh to himself: "Jarves must have been a wild-eyed young man . . . like me." And the conceit pleased him, and he felt sympathy for the strange, will-o'-the-wisp editor who had so befriended Hawaii and the missionaries, until he suddenly looked at the name again: James Jackson Jarves! Hadn't he heard that name in another context?
He hurried from the library and went to the exhibition hall where one of the glories of Yale University stood: the collection of early Italian masterpieces gathered together by a curious man named James Jackson Jarves, who had lived in Florence in the 1850's. Hoxworth hurried into the gallery and walked among the strange, faraway, gold and blue painting of an age he could not even begin to comprehend. He was unprepared to like the art he saw in the Jarves collection, and he did not try to do so, for it was in no way similar to the work of Raphael and Rembrandt, which he had been taught was true art; but as he gazed at the affectionate little paintings--more than a hundred of them--he sensed that they had been, collected by someone who had loved them, and he asked an attendant, "Who was this man Jarves?" The man didn't know, so Hale sought out another, and finally the curator: "Who was Jarves?"
The curator had a brief memorandum on the forgotten donor and said, "An American writer on art who lived in Florence in the middle years of the last century. A close friend of Elizabeth and Robert Browning and John Ruskin. In his own way, an eminent man, and America's first writer on art."
"Did he ever live in Hawaii?"
"No. But late in life he did write the first book in English on Japanese art. He discovered prints as art forms so he must have lived in the Orient, although I have no knowledge of the fact."
"Hawaii isn't in the Orient," Hale explained.
"Isn't it considered part of Asia?"
"No," Hale replied sharply and left. In those days he did not think much of faculty members.
He was puzzled. It seemed most unlikely that two men of such dissimilar natures as the rambunctious Hawaiian editor and the polished Italian art connoisseur could have been the same man, and yet there was the name: James Jackson Jarves; so he continued his researches and discovered at last that his Hawaiian Jarves had failed to make a living with his Polynesian and had fled in disgust to Florence, where he became the first great American collector of paintings, the first American art philosopher, and the first writer on Japanese aesthetics. He felt a proprietary interest in the strange man and thought: "That's not bad for a Hawaii boy!"
And then, as he looked into the peculiar circumstances whereby Yale acquired the Jarves paintings, he became appalled at the unsavory tricks the college had used to steal them, and he forgot all about the missionaries and began digging into the events of 1871, when the former editor of the Polynesian was fifty-three years old and in sore need of money. Yale had loaned him $20,000 on his paintings, and he had been unable to repay the debt, so the college put the entire collection up for public auction, 119 masterpieces in all, worth $70,000 or $80,000 then . . . over a million