ABOUT AGNES REPPLIER, AUTHOR OF THE FIRESIDE SPHINX

In her heyday, Agnes Repplier (1855 – 1950) was a renowned essayist and one of the most influential literary voices in the United States. Her first book was published in 1888.

Repplier was born on April 1, 1855, the daughter of John Repplier (of French descent) and Agnes Mathias (of German descent). She was educated in the Roman Catholic church. At nine years old, Repplier was unable to read, despite her mother’s best attempts, but her retentive memory allowed her to memorise long ballads learnt by heart from her mother. She taught herself to read at age ten, which suggests that the teaching methods of her time were not suited to her way of learning. When she applied herself to studies, she studied only what interested her and ignored the rest.

After schooling, Agnes remained independent-minded (she had been wilful and rebellious at school) and continued her own education by reading. Her earliest published essays and short stories appeared in newspapers and in The Catholic World, but were of such good quality that they found a wider audience in the columns of magazines.

William Farquhar Payson briefly Interviewed her for The New York Times’s Saturday book review section of June 08, 1907: Agnes Repplier is of French extraction, though she herself was born, brought up, and still lives in Philadelphia. She obtained her education at the Sacred Heart Convent at Torresdale, Penn, and is still a Roman Catholic. Her book “In Our Convent Days” tells of her own life at school. As to what has given her most pleasure to write she says: “The two books I wrote ‘conamore’ are ‘The Fireside Sphinx’ (cats are the passion of my life) and ‘In Our Convent Days.’ The latter is purely autobiographical.” Elizabeth Robins Pennell, to whom it is dedicated, was to have collaborated with me; but she would not cross the sea and I could not stay in London, and so I had to write it alone. She also has a passion for cats and it was from her that I gathered much of the material for ‘The Fireside Sphinx.’”

Her writing career spanned sixty-five years, during which she developed friendships with a number of noted writers, artists, and scholars.

In THE NOTRE DAME SCHOLASTIC (Feb 17th, 1923), Merlin Rolwing’s essay wrote thus:

Repplier never married. She lived with, and cared for, her older sister Mary and her invalid brother Louis. Her mind remained sharp and curious through her eighties and nineties as evidenced by press interviews. She died in Philadelphia aged ninety-five.

WOMEN AUTHORS OF OUR DAY IN THEIR HOMES
Personal Descriptions and Interviews. Edited with an Introduction and Additions by Francis Whiting
THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY, 1903

Agnes Repplier
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SHE has revived the art, well-nigh lost in these days, of the essayist. There is no province of the essayist that she has not touched, and there is nothing which she has touched that she has not adorned. Her wisdom is illuminated by her wit, and her wit is controlled by her wisdom." This is the partial characterization of the contributions made by Agnes Repplier to American letters, as delivered by Dr. Horace Howard Furness on the 22d of February, 1902, when the University of Pennsylvania honored her with the degree of Doctor of Letters. While the scholarly old gentleman was speaking, the whole of that great gathering remained standing, and the heartiest applause met his closing sentence: "Into thousands of homes her voice has brought learning and elevation, purity and refinement, and her Fireside Sphinx, with well-sheathed claws, will play immortally in the fields of Asphodel with Lesbia's sparrow."

Slight and somewhat gray, with kindly expression and the most genial, genuine manner, Miss Repplier is the very embodiment of that good sense which she is said most to admire in both men and women, and of that artistic temperament which shows so clearly in every one of her delightful essays, as well as in everything with which she has surrounded herself in her Philadelphia apartments. There, too, is her quaint humor, a constant quantity, coming again to the surface as, looking down into the city streets from her windows, she said : " Philadelphia is not pretty, and it is badly run, and has a wretched climate, but it does offer one pleasant people and delicious butter.

" I am not really a Philadelphian, you know," she continued. " The mere chance that brought my father here, and allowed me to see the light here first, does not make me one. Just residence, and only residence, can never make your true Philadelphian. Of course, I have lived here most of my life, but in the true sense of the word I may be said to have no real home, which is not saying that I would not like to have one, for I should, and very much; but when that home comes I hope it will be in the country, and not all cramped up in a city."

Whether they seem to her home or not, Miss Repplier's rooms at 1900 Chestnut Street are very attractive. The morning sun, given freer play over the green yard of the old marble mansion across the street, floods them with warmth and cheeriness, bringing out the colors of the hangings and every least detail of the pictures that crowd the walls. Many of these are photographs of the works of the old masters, Leonardo da Vinci's for the most part, but the majority are of " the suave and puissant cat."

On the landing of the stairs the cat-pictures begin, and all about the room they continue ; Mme. Ronner's furry pussies and the cosey creations of Miss Bonsall's brush. On the table sits in state a great china Agrippina; across one of the bookcases staggers another, its paws full of struggling kittens ; by it lies Steinlen's " Dessins sans Paroles des Chats," and the entire top of a little inlaid writing- desk is covered so thick with diminutive bronze cats of all climes, ages, and sizes that there remains room for not one more.

But the occupant loves more than cats. There are many pictures of children, recalling that first of her Atlantic essays on " Children, Past and Pre ent," while the great case of books that stands opposite the desk where Miss Repplier does her writing shows often the names of Shakespeare, Scott, and Keats and Charles Lamb, of course.

" I am just about to say good-by to all of this for a time," said Miss Repplier. " In a few days now I sail for Europe. The summer I expect to divide between Touraine and Brittany, with Lombardy later, and Rome for the winter. I shall not go to England if I can possibly avoid it though once upon a time I thought I should rather live in London than anywhere else in the world. All told, I hope to be abroad some seventeen months, though I may be back within the year.

" It is very seldom that I feel I can take a whole winter for a trip like this. You see I cannot often get so far away from my base of supplies my books. If I could only write all out of my head now, as some lucky people can do, it would be very different. As for me, I can no more learn to do it than I can write fiction, and I assure you that that is quite out of the question. The only book I ever did all on one subject was my ' Sphinx,' and it took me quite seven years to finish that."

Miss Repplier's plans for work while she is abroad are not extensive. Her weekly " little creeds " for Life are to be continued, and she has yet to finish two of six essays which had been promised to Mr. Alden for Harper 's Magazine, but beyond this her only work will be upon two volumes of essays which are to be brought out by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. in the fall of 1903. One is to be made up of what Miss Repplier calls " my customary excursions into literature," and the other of essays rather historical than literary, the titles of "The Pilgrim" and "The Headsman," already chosen, being typical of those which are to follow.

Speaking of her work, and apropos of a remark which made mention of some quotations of which she had made use in one of her essays, Miss Rep- plier said: " Isn't that an awful habit of mine, that quoting? Really, I think it is vicious, and I promise you I am trying very hard to overcome it. The great trouble is that half the time when I start to say something I remember that someone else has said it already, and so much better than I could ever hope to.

" No, my memory is not so very good. It is merely that I recall clearly the books I read when I was a little girl. My theory is that one always remembers what one likes, and very seldom what one dislikes, and that, like Dr. Johnson, one is apt to live for the last half of life on the memory of books read in the first half."

Of that childhood of hers and its reading Miss Repplier talks very amusingly. She is very sure she must have been an exception to the rule for genius, as she was so far from precocious that at nine she was still unable to read. " At last," she says, " I learned my letters with infinite tribulation out of a horrible little book called ' Reading Without Tears.' It was a brown book, and had on its cover two stout and unclothed cupids holding the volume open between them and making an ostentatious pretence of enjoyment. It might have been possible for cupids who needed no wardrobes and sat comfort ably on clouds to like such lessons, but for an ordinary little girl in frock and pinafore they were simply heartbreaking.

" Had it only been my good fortune to be born twenty years later spelling would have been left out of my early discipline, and I should have found congenial occupation in sticking pins or punching mysterious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But when I was young the world was sadly unenlightened in these matters; the plain duty of every child was to learn how to read, and the more hopelessly dull I showed myself to be the more imperative became the need of forcing some information into me. For two bitter years I had for my constant companion that hated ' reader ' which began with such isolated statements as ' Anne had a cat ' and ended with a dismal story about a little African boy named Sam."

From the first, however, it seems that Mrs. Repplier was a firm believer in her daughter's future. "You, Agnes, can write," she used to say, and at the earliest moment possible Agnes tried to fulfil those hopes. She wrote first for the daily papers, then for a religious monthly in New York, and then at last sent an essay to The Atlantic. To this day she is grateful to Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who was at that time editor of the magazine, for accepting and publishing " Children, Past and Pres ent," and tells many stories of his encouragement, which did so much, she says, to smooth the first miles of the road of letters.

" One gets some idea of the sort of man and friend which Mr. Aldrich was," she continued, " by remembering that it was he who found and helped to their first real successes Elizabeth Rob- bins, who is now Mrs. Pennell, and Amelie Rives. I recall, by the way, how he once said to me of the ' Brother to Dragons,' ' Miss Rives will never do anything better than this.' She never did anything quite so good."

There is another story which Miss Repplier tells, somewhat at her own expense, though it also seems to support her belief that she is not a Philadelphian. It seems that one of the first readers of her early essays in The Atlantic was Dr. Furness, Sr., the father of the editor of " The Variorum Shakespeare." Going to Miss Irwin, now President of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, he asked: "Do you happen to know a Boston woman who is contributing to The Atlantic over the signature of ' Agnes Repplier'?" "Bless you," replied Miss Irwin, " she lives at your very door. Once she was a student in my school in Philadelphia, and she lives there to-day."

CATS.; MISS REPPLIER'S BOOK ON THEIR HISTORY AND LITERATURE
The New York Times, November 23, 1901

SAYS Miss Repplier somewhere in her "The Fireside Sphinx," "A very enlightened and cat loving family," but for her this is tautology. All cat covers are very enlightened; all the very enlightened are cat lovers. It is only the rude and coarse who permit dogs to affright and worry pussy; only the unfeeling and uneducated who say "Scat"; only the brutal, the dangerous to refined society who fling water or hurl solid testimonials of feeling at pussy singing, and Miss Repplier well knows it. She dedicated her book to Agrippina, the lovely being for whom many an Atlantic reader sighed, whose picture is the frontispiece. Not to see her calm, disdainful glance, confidently expectant of tribute, but prepared to receive it with proper gracious dignity, is to have missed an experience.

To care for any subject whatsoever and to seek for its history and traces in books are the same with this author, and she finds her first cat in the Ark, into which the lioness squeezed [sneezed?] her on the invitation of Noah, when the rats and the mice they made such a strife, and then in Egypt, to which Pasht gave her smiling mood. There she was a mighty hunter of water fowl, as now in cities of sparrows, and the State was taxed for her fish and bread soaked in milk as the American Government departments are even to this day. Greece knew but little of the cat, but an ancient Greek house must have been a most uncomfortable place for any warmth-loving animal. The cat did not lose much.

A second chapter deals with the cat of the Dark Ages, for the brightening of which the Crusaders brought her from the East. She lived in convents, and the nuns and abbesses might wear no fur but hers. The monks of Cyprus kept cats to kill serpents. Mohammed loved his cat, Muezza, to the point of sacrificing a sleeve rather than to disturb her slumber upon it, and the Moslem of all nations treats the cat with becoming deference. But by little and little, pussy became the witch's familiar, the token of evil; the stigma clung to her for centuries, crossed the seas to Massachusetts Bay, and even now no black cat of ordinary prudence tempts fate by lingering near a Christian boy.

"Oh to be in England," could not have been the cat's song. Miss Repplier quotes this description, dated 1397:

"This beaste is called a Musion, for that he is enimie to Myse and Rattes. He is slye and wittie, and seeth so sharpely that he overcommeth darknes of the nighte by the shyninge lyghte of his eyne. In shape of bodye he is lyke unto a Leoparde, and hathe a great mouthe. He dothe delight that he enjoyeth his libertye ; and in his youthe he is swifte, plyante and merrie. He maketh a rufull noyse and a gastefull when he profereth to fighte with an other. He is a cruell beaste when he is wilde, and falleth on his owne feete from most high places, and seldom is hurt therewith. When he hath a fayre skinne, he is, as it were, prowde thereof, and then he goeth faste aboute to be scene."

Indeed, at first the cat was not so much beloved as respected, and Skelton wrote of "Gyb, our cat savage," berating him for the death of on Phylyp Sparrow, and cursing him with ferocious ingenuity:

Of Inde the gredy grypes
Myght tere out all thy trypes !
Of Arcady the beares
Myght plucke awaye thyne eares !
The wylde wolfe Lycaon
Byte asondre thy backe bone !
Of Ethna the brennynge hyll,
That day and nyghte brenneth styl,
Set in thy tayle a blase,
That all the world may gase
And wonder upon thee !
From Ocyan the greate sea
Unto the Isles of Orchady ;
From Tyllbery ferry
To the playne of Salysbery !
So trayterously my byrde to kyll,
That never ought thee evyll wyll ! "

The cat in proverbs, and in heraldry, on signboards, in Shakespeare, who has many a good word to toss at a dog, but none for her, is given proper consideration, and a whole chapter is devoted to "The Cat in Art." In "The Cat Triumphant" one meets the puss of Herrick, who offered his "green-eyed kittling's" attractions as inducement to a desired visitor; Walpole's cat, whose elegy Gray wrote; Cowper's kittens, who played with the viper, and his cat upon whose back one of the hares drummed; Steele's cat who "affected the Behaviour of the little Dog" with whom she was reared; Dr Johnson's Hodge, from whom Boswell "suffered a good deal"; Sir Walter's Hinse of Hinsefield, who kept Maida "in the greatest possible order," and Kit North's cat, who summoned other warriors to battle with him until the back green "was absolutely composed of cats." The Carlyle cats, whose reigns were shorter than those of the later Roman Emperors; Byron's cat who lived with a menagerie of other creatures; Matthew Arnold's Atossa

Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable, and grand ;

and Blacky, who cheerfully ran about on three legs like the splendid fox in Mr Fraser's story, are also called from their homes in books.

French cats have been fortunate. A beast of such subtlety, capable of manner so perfect, commends itself to the Latin mi=ind. Chateaubriand inherited Leo XII's cat and "tried to help him to forget the Sistine Chapel"; Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier, Merimee, Taine, loved cats and delighted to write of them, and Pierre Loti's two cats live in his pages as the Black Prince and Da Gueselin in Froissart's chronicle. In the last chapter, "The Cat of Today," are collected American reminiscences. Ordinarily one thinks of George Washington's father as declining to whip George, but Miss Repplier shows him in another act of renunciation, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair rather than disturb the cat who fancied the cushion as a place of repose. A Norfolk lady's cat attended family prayers and cuffed her kitten's ears if they were restless. This chapter abounds in small credible anecdotes and in verse from admirable cat-loving poets, and occasional passages from Mr Andrew Lang and Mr Robinson, and it ends with a tender little picture of Agrippina:

I stop my work and look at her, or rather I look at her ghost, the inspiration of this poor book, written to do her honour. It is finished now, and Agrippina sleeps. I lay it gently down before the shadowy presence. It is her password to Elysium. It is my offering to her, and hers to the Immortals, that they may give her place. She has waited for it seven years. Little grey phantom, haunt me no longer with reproachful eyes. I have kept my word. I have done my best. And the book belongs to you.

AGNES REPPLIER
The New York Times, April 26, 1902

She has revived the art, well-nigh lost in these days, of the essayist. There to no province of the essayist that she has not touched, and there is nothing which she has touched that she has not adorned. Her wisdom is illuminated by her wit, and her wit is controlled by her wisdom.” This is the partial characterisation of the contributions made by Agnes Repplier to American letters, as delivered by Dr. Horace Howard Furness on the 22d of February last, when the University of Pennsylvania honored her with the degree of Doctor of Letters. While the scholarly old gentleman was speaking the whole of that great gathering remained standing, and the heartiest applause met his closing sentence:

“ Into thousands of homes her voice has brought learning and elevation, purity, and refinement, and her Fireside Sphinx, with well sheathed claws, will play immortally In the fields of Asphodel with Lesbia’s sparrow.”

Slight and somewhat gray, with kindly expression and the most genial, genuine manner, Miss Repplier is the very embodiment of that good sense which she is said to most admire in both men and women, and of that artistic temperament which shows so clearly in every one of her delightful essays, as well as everything with which she has surrounded herself in her Philadelphia apartments. There, too, is her quaint humor, a constant quantity, coming again to the surface as, looking down into the city streets from her windows, she said: “Philadelphia is not pretty, and it is badly run, and has a wretched climate, but it does offer one pleasant people and delicious butter.

” I am not really a Philadelphian, you know,” she continued. The mere chance that brought my father here, and allowed me to see the light here first, does not make me one. Just residence and only residence can never make your true Philadelphian. Of course I have lived here most of my life, but in the true sense of the word I may be said to have no real home, which is not saying that I would not like to have one, for I should, and very much; but when that home comes I hope it will be in the country, and not all cramped up in a city.”

Whether they seem to her home or not, Miss Repplier’s rooms at 1,000 Chestnut Street are very attractive. The morning sun, given freer play over the green yard of the old marble mansion across the street, floods them with, warmth and cheeriness, bringing out the colors of the hangings and every least detail of the pictures that crowd the walls. Many of these are photographs of the works of the old masters, Leonardo da Vinci's for the most part, but the majority are of the “the suave and puissant cat." On the landing of the stairs the cat pictures commence, and all about the room they continue; Mme. Ronner's furry pussies and the cosy creations of Miss Bonsall's brush. On the table sits in slate a great china Agrippina; across one of the bookcases staggers another, its paws full of struggling kittens; by it lies Steinlen’s “Dessins sans Paroles des Chats,” and the entire top of a little inlaid writing desk is covered so thick with diminutive bronze cats of all climes, ages, and sexes that there remains room for not one more.

But the occupant loves more than cats. There are many pictures of children, recalling that first of her Atlantic essays on “Children, Past and Present,” while the great case of books that stands opposite the desk where Miss Repplier does her writing shows often the names of Shakespeare, Scott, and Keats — and Charles Lamb, of course.

” I am just about to say good-bye to all of this for a time.” said Miss Repplier “In a few days now I sail for Europe. The Summer I expect to divide between Touraine and Brittany, with Lombardy later, and Rome for the Winter. I shall not go to England If I can possibly avoid it — though once upon a time I thought I should rather live in London than anywhere else in the world. All told, I hope to be abroad some seventeen months, though I may be back within the year.

"It is very seldom that I feel I can take a whole Winter for a trip like this. You see I cannot often get so far away from my base of supplies — my books. If I could only write, all out of my head now, as some lucky people can do, it would be very different. As for me I can no more learn to do it than I can write fiction, and I assure you that that is quite out of the question. The only book I ever did all on one subject was my Sphinx, and it took me quite seven years to finish that.”

Miss Repplier’s plans for work while she is abroad are not extensive. Her weekly “little creeds” for life are to be continued, and she has yet to finish two of six essays which had been promised to Mr. Alden for Harper's Magazine, but beyond this her only work will be upon two volumes of essays which are to be brought out by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. in the Fall of 1903. One is to be made up of what Miss Repplier calls “my customary excursions into literature,” and the other of essays rather historical than literary, the titles of "The Pilgrim" and “The Headsman,” already chosen, being typical of those which are to follow.

Speaking of her work, and apropos of a remark which made mention of some quotations of which she had made use in one of her essays, Miss Repplier said: “Isn’t that an awful habit of mine, that quoting? Really, I think it is vicious, and I promise you I am trying very hard to overcome it. The great trouble is that half the time when I start to say something, I remember that someone else has said it already, and so much better than I could ever hope to.

” No, my memory is not so very good. It is merely that I recall clearly the books I read when I was a little girl. My theory is that one always renumbers what one likes, and very seldom what one dislikes, and that, like Dr. Johnson, one is apt to live for the last half of life on the memory of books read in the first half.”

Of that childhood of hers and its reading Miss Repplier tells very amusingly. She is very sure she must have been an exception to the rule for genius, as she was so far from precocious that at nine she was still unable to read. “At last," she says, “I learned my letters with infinite tribulation out of a horrible little book called ‘Reading Without Tears.' It was a brown book, and had on its cover two stout and unclothed cupids holding the volume open between them and making an ostentatious pretense of enjoyment. It might have been possible for cupids who needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on clouds to like such lessons, but for an ordinary little girl in frock and pinafore they were simply heartbreaking. Had it only been my good fortune to be born twenty years later spelling would have been left out of my early discipline, and I should have found congenial occupation in sticking pins or punching mysterious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But when I was young the world was sadly unenlightened in these matters: the plain duty of every child was to learn how to read, and the more hopelessly dull I showed myself to be the more imperative became the need of forcing some information in me. For two bitter years I had for my constant companion that hated reader, which began with such isolated statements as 'Anne had a cat’ and ended with a dismal story about a little African boy named Sam.”

From the first, however, it seems that Mrs. Repplier was a firm believer in her daughter’s future. “You, Agnes, can write," she used to say, and at the earliest moment possible Agnes tried to fulfill those hopes. She wrote first for the daily papers, then for a religious monthly in New York, and then at last sent an essay to The Atlantic. To this day she is grateful to Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who was at that time editor of the magazine, for accepting and publishing “Children, Past and Present,” and tells many stories of his encouragement which did so much, she says, to smooth the first miles of the road of letters.

” One gets some idea of the sort of man — and friend — which Mr. Aldrich was," she continued, ” by remembering that it was he who found and helped to their first real successes Elisabeth Robbins, who is now Mrs. Pennell, and Amelie Rives. I recall, by the way, how he once said to me of the ‘Brother to Dragons,' ‘Miss Rives will never do anything better than this.’ She never did anything quite so good.”

There is another story which Mies Repplier tells, somewhat at her own expense, though it also seems to support her belief that she is not a Philadelphian. It seems that one of the first readers of her early essays in The Atlantic was Dr. Furness, Sr., the father of the editor of The Variorums. Golng to Miss Irwin, now President of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, he asked: "Do you happen to know a Boston woman who is contributing to The Atlantic over the signature of ' Agnes Repplier‘?" ” Bless you,” replied Miss Irwin, “she lives at your very door. Once she was a student in my school in Philadelphia, and she lives there to-day."
WARWICK J. PRICE.